Thor Kitchen HRF3601F Counter-Depth French Door Refrigerator review: By the hammer of Thor, this no-name fridge is pretty good! – CNET

We’re all more or less familiar with the major manufacturers of home appliances — your Whirlpools, your GEs, your Kenmores, what have you. Up above them lies the luxury crop: Viking, Sub-Zero, Wolf, etc.

And then there’s Thor Kitchen. Based out of California, the brand doesn’t offer a huge catalog of appliances. Instead, its focus is a luxurious, “pro-style,” dual-fuel range and a suite of stainless steel appliances built to match it — all of which can be had together for about $5,000 through retailers like Home Depot and AJ Madison.

Included in that suite: a counter-depth French door refrigerator that sells for about $1,800, which is a pretty decent price for this sort of fridge. With branding clearly designed to mimic names like Viking (and fool your houseguests into thinking you spent more on your kitchen renovation than you actually did), I was plenty skeptical as I started testing the thing out, and I wasn’t reassured by the near-complete lack of meaningful features. But the pristine performance proved me wrong, with accurate, consistent temperatures throughout all of my tests — and not a single hot spot anywhere inside. It’s a basic build, but Thor’s counter-depth fridge offers excellent value, and is well worth a look if you’re in the market for a bargain.

The Thor Kitchen fridge keeps things simple with a Loki — er, low-key design.

Chris Monroe/CNET

As luxury lookalikes go, Thor Kitchen’s fridge does the bare minimum. You get a stainless steel finish and a freezer that’s split into two separate drawers, but you also get dated-looking touch controls and no in-door water dispenser. If anything, it looks a bit like a luxury fridge from fifteen years ago. It isn’t ugly, but the aesthetic doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, either.

The touch controls look a little dated for my tastes.

Chris Monroe/CNET

The interior is fairly bare-bones, as well. The only real feature of note is a deli drawer that runs a bit colder than the rest of the fridge. It’s a good spot for meats and cheeses, but it doesn’t come with its own, distinct temperature presets like you’ll find in some other French door models. There’s also a little pull-out bin in between the crispers that you might use for storing things like shredded cheese ahead of taco night, but it sits quite loose, and feels rickety to the touch.

Aside from the counter-depth build, which means it’ll sit flush with your counter tops, the most notable design element is probably the split freezer, with two matching drawers stacked on top of each other. You’ll find the ice maker dishing out cubes into a bin in the top drawer, complete with a little plastic scoop — a simple, thoughtful inclusion that I haven’t seen in other fridges with similar ice makers.

All told, you get just shy of 21 cubic feet of storage space from this fridge, 15.2 of which are allocated to the refrigerator compartment up top. Those are good numbers, and larger ones than you’ll get with comparable counter-depth models from names like GE, Samsung, LG and Whirlpool.