Should You Buy a Samsung Bespoke Fridge? - Consumer Reports (2024)

It’s rare to see a new design take off in the world of appliances, but Samsung appears to have created a popular—or at least discussion-worthy—combination of innovations with its Bespoke refrigerators, introduced over the past few years. These fridges allow you to mix and match glass and stainless steel panels in various colors to match your own aesthetic while also providing some new features, such as including two different types of icemakers in the same model.

Should you buy a Bespoke fridge? And if so, which one?

First thing to know: Samsung Bespoke fridges are expensive. They start at $2,300 for the cheapest side-by-side model and climb past $5,000 for the top-of-the-line 4-Door Flex French-door with AI Family Hub+ (more on that mouthful below). It’s not unusual to find a deal that drops the cheapest Bespoke models below $2,000, but for comparison, GE’s similarly high-end Profile line starts at $1,200 and tops out at $4,400 before any discounts.

The 4 Features That Make Bespoke Fridges Unique

Samsung Bespoke Panels

The biggest draw of Samsung Bespoke refrigerators is their design aesthetic, which comes from the unusual panels that cover the doors. Samsung provides seven glass finishes to choose from (charcoal, clementine, matte gray, morning blue, pink, sunrise yellow, and white), along with four stainless steel finishes (emerald green, matte black, plain stainless steel, and navy).

You can mix and match any of these on Bespoke French-door fridges, whether you choose a three-door, four-door, or 4 Door Flex model. (A four-door model has two French-doors at the top of the fridge and two pull-out drawers below, while the 4 Door Flex model has two sets of French-doors stacked on top of each other.)

Bespoke side-by-sides don’t give you the option to mix and match panels. You can get a Bespoke side-by-side only in white glass or plain stainless steel finishes.

When you buy a Bespoke French-door unaltered from a retailer, the panels will usually all be the same color and finish. If you want to customize the mix of panels before you buy, you can use the Bespoke Design Studio to do so. Otherwise, you can purchase new panels in the colors/finishes you want and swap them out using the Bespoke Suction Cup tool, $30. New panels range from $50 to $150 depending on the panel size. You’ll need three or four of them if you want to change all the panels at once.

To take your design a step further, you can also opt for MyBespoke Custom Panels, which use your own pictures or artwork uploaded to Samsung’s design tool. These panels are also exclusive to Bespoke French-doors and only replace the top panels on the fresh-food compartment doors. The service costs about $300 per panel.

No other manufacturer offers styles similar to the Bespoke fridges. The closest may be LG, which announced its MoodUP refrigerators, which have LED light panels on the doors that can be changed to different color combinations. Those refrigerators have yet to come to market.

Beverage Center and Dual Ice Makers

Many refrigerators have through-the-door ice and water dispensers, but Bespoke refrigerators forgo these for what the company calls a Beverage Center and Dual Ice Makers.

The Beverage Center is a section on the inside of one of the fresh-food doors that has an AutoFill Water Pitcher with an infuser (to make fruit-infused water) as well as an internal water dispenser. Bespoke French-doors have the Beverage Center inside the left door, while Bespoke side-by-sides have it inside the right door. Some lower-budget Bespoke fridges don’t have the full Beverage Center but do include the AutoFill Water Pitcher.

The Dual Ice Makers are in the freezer compartment and create two types of ice that are dispensed into their own bins. One icemaker creates large ice cubes, while the other churns out small ice bites, which are similar to the Sonicnugget ice(connoisseurs claim that the bites aren’t as soft and crunchy!) that has a cult following at the fast-food chain.All Bespoke fridges have Dual Ice Makers.

One note on reliability: Samsung side-by-side refrigerators are particularly prone to icemaker problems, according to CR’s member surveys, while the company’s French-door models stand out for having icemaker and dispenser problems. We don’t have data specific to Bespoke fridges, and while the Beverage Center is essentially a fancy water dispenser, it’s not a through-the-door unit. (See more on the most and least reliable refrigerator brands, including details on Samsung French-door and side-by-side models.)

To be clear, Samsung is not the only company to come up with variations on water/ice dispensers and icemakers. Some GE fridges have autofill water pitchers, while many LG refrigerators have two different icemakers (one for cubed or crushed ice, the other for round co*cktail-style ice that LG calls Craft Ice). French-doors and side-by-sides made by GE and LG score higher for predicted reliability in CR surveys than their Samsung competitors.

Family Hub, Family Hub+, and AI Family Hub+

It’s confusing, but Samsung offers three different versions of its Family Hub tablet and camera system in various Bespoke fridges.

To begin, the plain old Family Hub features a 21.5-inch touchscreen and three internal cameras to let you view the contents of your fridge while you’re out shopping. Many popular apps and services are built into the Family Hub tablet, including Alexa, Amazon, Google Photos, Instacart, Pandora,Ring (to viewRing doorbellandcamerafeeds),Samsung TV Plus (to watch free streaming TV channels), andSpotify.

Additionally, the Family Hub can act as a SmartThings smart home hub for devices in your home, including Matter and Thread smart home devices. But to use it that way, you’ll need to buy a SmartThings Hub Dongle, $35, which has an extra wireless radio for devices that use ZigBee and Thread wireless technology.

Next, the Family Hub+ can do everything the regular Family Hub does, but it has a bigger 32-inch touchscreen and the extra smart home hardware is built into it, meaning you can ditch the dongle.

Finally, there’s the AI Family Hub+. It’s essentially the Family Hub+ with extra AI features and a new camera system that enables Samsung’s AI Vision Inside. This new feature uses a single camera mounted at the top of the fresh-food cavity to automatically identify food as you place it inside the refrigerator. You can then view the items on the Family Hub tablet to add expiration dates and look up recipes that use the ingredients you already have. You can also pull up a list of these items on your smartphone, using the SmartThings app, to see what you need while grocery shopping.

The other big feature of the AI Family Hub+ is called AI Energy Mode. This feature is supposed to save energy and money by adjusting the compressor speed and defrost time of the freezer based on how you use the fridge.

These Family Hub features can feel gimmicky. But the AI Energy Mode might provide some legitimate savings, and once it’s in your home, a Bespoke refrigerator can get software updates—at least for the first few years.

Samsung says it will provide such updates for seven years, but many people expect to keep a refrigerator for longer than that. Looking back, Samsung added the Amazon Alexa voice assistant to its second-generation and newer Family Hub fridges back in 2021, but the original 2016 Family Hub didn’t receive that update. Similarly, the company just announced it will bring AI-generated wallpapers and an AI upgrade for Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant to Family Hub fridges—but only to select models. The wallpaper feature is coming to models dating back to 2022, while the Bixby upgrade is only coming to a single 2024 model.

FlexZone, WiFi, and Auto Open

These additional features of Bespoke fridges can be appealing to many people, though they aren’t quite as flashy as what’s described above.

• FlexZone. A compartment that can convert from fresh-food to freezer storage space and back. It’s available on Bespoke French-door fridges, either as a drawer on four-door models or as the bottom-right compartment on 4 Door Flex models. It’s available on many Samsung refrigerators, not just the Bespoke and Family Hub lines.
• WiFi Connectivity. All Bespoke refrigerators have WiFi connectivity, allowing you to connect a fridge to the Samsung SmartThings app so you can remotely control it and, if it has internal cameras, view the contents of the fresh-food compartment.
• Auto Open Door. Some Bespoke fridges have a fresh-food compartment door that automatically pops open when you tap a sensor on the door. It won’t open fully—you still have to pull it all the way open— but the feature makes it easier to open the door if your hands are full of groceries.

CR’s Test Results for Bespoke Fridges

How Consumer Reports Tests Refrigerators

We outfit each refrigerator with 15 temperature sensors in a climate-controlled chamber and monitor it for more than a month, collecting more than 5.4 million temperature readings that identify warm and cold spots, to determine which models will keep your food fresh longest. We also evaluate the energy efficiency of each refrigerator and how quietly (or not so quietly) it runs. CR test engineers also judge how easy refrigerators are to use, factoring in a fridge’s layout, controls, and lighting.

If you’ve ever felt like your fridge can’t store as much food as you think it should, we’ve got you covered there, too. Our engineers calculate the usable storage space of a fridge by measuring each individual shelf, drawer, and bin while subtracting space taken up by icemakers, dispensers, filters, and other parts. We find the total usable storage space is often much less than a fridge’s claimed storage capacity, which is essentially a measurement of the fridge as a big empty box.

In addition to our lab tests, we also factor in annual survey data from tens of thousands of CR members on fridges they’ve purchased over the last decade to judge brand reliability and owner satisfaction. In our 2023 survey, we collected data from over 65,000 members about 80,000 refrigerators that they own. We then use this data to create predicted reliability and owner satisfaction scores for each brand and type of refrigerator.

All of that—and then some—informs CR’s refrigerator ratings and each model’s Overall Score.

For more information on CR’s refrigerator tests, see our How We Test Refrigerators page.