When You Love to Cook: Designing the Perfect Kitchen is a Dream Come True
Kitchens are important.
They aren’t just the place where the refrigerator stands or the staging area for home meals. A kitchen can be one of the most important social areas in a home, be it in a one-bedroom apartment or a 20-something-room mansion. Kitchens can serve as a focal point in any home, which can lead many to dream up new layouts for their kitchens, whether your designing for kitchens in Perth or Texas.
Visualize Before You Materialize
Any home project begins with the vision of what the owner wants to create. With kitchens, that includes reviewing a kitchen’s current setup such as entry ways, windows, bars, doors, and square footage. But beyond those obvious considerations, the individual needs to consider how the kitchen gets used in a given house. Does the kitchen only serve a meal preparation area, or does it also function as the dining room? How does the kitchen relate to the other rooms of a house? Where does the kitchen work with the living room and dining areas?
Once these have been established, the individual can then decide how the new kitchen will work in relation to these factors. They can plot the inclusion of a serving bar area with cabinets facing the kitchen’s interior, for example, doubling the storage space while also providing a meal preparation and serving area with the bar.
Maintain Organization
Organization plays an important role in kitchen remodeling, primarily because the kitchen has to serve as a safe place for meal preparation and cooking.
Food prepared incorrectly can be hazardous to everyone in a home, especially the cook in the kitchen. As such, a certain level of clustering, or similar groupings, should be considered in any kitchen redesign. That is, the kitchen redesign should take into consideration how the new kitchen will function from a food preparation point of view. It would be wise, for example, to keep the sink, preparation counter, and stove close to each other to maximize the activities in a given area. Common sense plays a big role here; if the kitchen stove will be used to make pasta dishes on a regular basis, the sink should be easily accessible to the stove.
Likewise, the refrigerator may best be served by keeping it close to the pantry and any other food storage areas. This would allow a better usage of space and prevent a kitchen user from having to dart from one end of the kitchen to the other searching for food and spices.
Lights On
When considering a kitchen redesign, lighting should not be neglected. Natural lighting through windows can create a greater comfort level in the kitchen, but track lighting or spot lighting can also be a big advantage for food preparation.
But that doesn’t mean the lighting has to be elevated, either. Surface-mounted lights and lighting strips under the counters can also produce dazzling lighting effects, depending on the user’s preferences.
Do the Research
Ultimately, any redesign job has to accommodate the user’s vision without destroying their budget. After the visualizations, do the footwork of finding out how to make the vision possible. You may even find the initial plans can be improved upon.
Featured image credit: Frankfeng via Pixabay
