What Has Four Doors, Three Cooling Zones, and Is the Best Fridge You’ve Never Heard Of?
Rachel Wharton covers large kitchen appliances. After decades of squeezing produce into cramped crispers, alternative options have turned her head.
Quad fridges inspire me to play Wheel of Fortune: I pretend I’m Vanna White opening each of the four doors to expose not consonants but cooling preeminence.
Up top, I show off the double-wide shelves of a regular French-door fridge. Then I move down to a tidily organized freezer on the bottom left and — the final reveal! — a compartment on the bottom right that refrigerates, freezes, or chills whatever you fancy to a temperature of your choosing. Dial it in for a chilled Lambrusco, store your garden greens at a setting less likely to lead to wilting, or keep that hand-shaved Tête de Moine a hair above fridge temp for your upcoming party.
Or, you know, just switch it to freezer mode and stock the drawers full of frozen burritos.
I’ve covered fridges for four years here at Wirecutter, and I’ve paid attention to how my fellow Americans stuff them full of food. A quad is absolutely one of the coolest and most versatile refrigerators out there — yet it’s likely that nobody you know actually owns one.
That is, nobody you know in the United States. This style is the most popular French-door configuration sold abroad, said Hyoung Min Park, a vice president at Samsung, the company that pioneered the style more than 20 years ago.
This 18.9-cubic-foot, 36-inch, counter-depth fridge has an especially elegant exterior, with slim handles, but it has less capacity than most other French-door models of its size. It features an external water dispenser and an internal ice maker, and its adjustable fourth compartment has four temperature zones.
But quad fridges are still barely a blip on US appliance radars, and they’re sold mostly in metropolitan areas, where people are more likely to be more familiar with the style, said Hannah Pregont, the creative director at appliance retailer AJ Madison.
Sales of quad refrigerators have ticked up slowly — about 4% year over year, Pregont said. But even so, some manufacturers, like Whirlpool or Fisher & Paykel, are moving away from promoting the quad at all.
And I think that’s a shame.
Permit me to gush on the quad
With its two sets of double doors, one on top of the other, a quad is technically a type of French-door fridge, but with side-by-side DNA. (The Quatro Freedom, Samsung’s breakout quad model, was designed on the body of a side-by-side fridge, and it was named a “cool must-have gadget” in 2006 by Time magazine.) I dig the quad’s pleasingly gridded design, which is a departure from the asymmetrical look of many French-door styles with doors on top and drawers on the bottom.
French-door fridges have long been the most popular style of refrigerator sold in the US, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), and I understand the appeal. That expansive, behold-my-culinary-kingdom view at the top is pretty sweet: Look at all of those snacky leftovers, soda-pop options, and sandwich supplies!
But a traditional French-door model’s freezer — basically a deep black hole of a drawer — can be a downer. It’s heavy to pull open, and items tend to get forgotten in the depths, wasting your food.
The freezer is exactly where quad models excel and innovate. The two separate lower compartments provide superior organization, with door pockets and drawers for easier sorting and storage.
With most quad models, that separation allows you to adjust the temperature of the bottom-right compartment (from the fridge’s control panel or, in some cases, with a connected app) to suit your needs.
For example, the Café quad, from GE Appliances, lets you tinker in three temperature zones: freezing (-6 °F to 5 °F), refrigerating (34°F to 40 °F), and chilling (41 °F to 43 °F).
The most current Samsung quad, meanwhile, has five settings: true freezer ( -8 °F to 5 °F); soft freeze, for, say, scoop-ready ice cream (23 °F); frozen meat and fish (30 °F); fresh fruits and vegetables (36 °F); and drinks (39 °F).
This 28.3-cubic-foot, 36-inch fridge has a handsome platinum glass finish and copper accents, and it’s available in counter depth. The interior is beautifully lit, and its fourth compartment switches between fridge, freezer, and chiller (and it has an optional wine rack). The company also makes a less expensive GE Profile model.
This 29-cubic-foot, 36-inch fridge has a water dispenser, makes two kinds of ice, and has a fourth compartment that toggles between a standard freezer and four fine-tuned temperature zones. It’s available in a few variations, including a model with a white glass finish and a counter-depth option.
It’s cool for customization
This level of refrigeration personalization is precisely what Americans say they want, according to Tricia Zach, the research director at the NKBA. In a 2026 survey, 76% of NKBA members said their clients were looking for “configurable space and adjustable zones” in their fridges. And 87% said those clients wanted more space just for drinks.
To accommodate all of us cold-beverage–loving Americans, the Café quad’s dedicated freezer compartment can store a whopping 12.5 pounds of ice, and the internal ice maker on the Samsung model churns out cubes in two different sizes. Still, that might not be enough to unseat the other beverage-forward appliances — wine fridges, mini fridges, garage fridges, countertop ice makers — that many Americans may prefer.
But if you don’t have room for a bunch of different refrigeration options, the quad comes through: You can switch up your chilled space as needed, which to me is the top selling point of this style. As a farmers-market frequent flyer, a home gardener, and a stinky-cheese devotee, I love the ability to swap between fridge and freezer on the fly — and to dial in more-precise storage conditions for specific categories of food and drinks.
That kind of compartmentalization is what led to the creation of the quad in the first place, said Hyoung Min Park, who worked on the original models at Samsung in the early aughts. The style was initially intended for Asian and European markets, where people tend to buy more fresh food than Americans do.
There is a glimmer of hope that my appreciation for customization is slowly catching on in the US. According to Jason May, the head of bottom-freezer fridges at GE Appliances, the company’s data shows that 60% of its owners use the adjustable compartment as an ordinary freezer, yet a not-insignificant 35% use the compartment for fresh food, and 5% use it as that in-between chiller.
So why don’t more people have a quad?
I admit, quad fridges have drawbacks. The gridded look can be polarizing. You still have to stoop to open freezer drawers, and you need to remember which bottom freezer compartment you stashed your food in. And if you use only one side as a freezer, you end up with just 6 cubic feet of freezer space. (Though, to be fair, that’s about the same amount you get in a traditional top freezer.)
These fridges also generally don’t come in widths less than 36 inches, so many US kitchens can’t even accommodate them. (You can find a 33-inch quad, but it has two fixed freezer compartments and lacks the temperature adjustability of its larger peers.)
Quad models tend to be more expensive than standard French-door fridges, too. Even so, they’re still not quite upscale enough for many people, said Hannah Pregont. They typically come in limited, more mainstream finish options, and only a few models are available as built-in or integrated styles, which are found in most higher-end kitchens. (Dacor and Summit make those, as well as extra-wide 42- or 48-inch versions.)
Quad fridges are also just hard to find on display at your local home center or big-box store, so it’s difficult to experience them in person or even discover that they exist. That could lead to lower demand and the possibility that the quad will disappear from the US market altogether.
Hence, my Hail Mary plan to raise its profile. True, this fridge style has limitations. But if you like to keep your stinky cheese away from your butter, are tired of tender greens turning to mush in a week, and wish you had a little more fridge space during the holidays — consider the quirky quad.
This article was edited by Rory Evans and Ingrid Skjong.
Meet your guide
Rachel Wharton
I am based in Brooklyn, New York, and I write about refrigerators, ranges, ovens, microwaves, cooktops, kitchen ventilation, and any other large appliances that relate to cooking, eating, or food. This work includes conducting hands-on tests and researching the best products. It also requires staying on top of environmental, health, and safety regulations, as well as related trends in cooking, smart home, accessibility, tech, and kitchen design.
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