Planning your kitchen
Make the most of the hub of your home with Anna-Marie DeSouza's design tips
Modern kitchens have a variety of uses – not just cooking – so if you’re self-building or renovating make sure to take extra care when planning this space. According to Build It’s design expert Hugo Tugman: “Kitchens need to be multifunctional as they’re not just places where food is prepared. They’re somewhere kids will do their homework, friends will congregate for coffee, barbeque food will be prepped to carry outside as well being the place for on-line grocery shopping, family meals, watching TV, washing the dog and everything else!”
The kitchen will be the most expensive room in your home to build and finish so it’s important that mistakes aren’t made. On average the amount spent on a kitchen is around double that of other rooms in the house, especially if you want a trendy open-plan kitchen/dining room.
Planning for new builds
If you’re self building, make the most of the opportunities that you don’t get with a renovation project. Consider the placement of the kitchen within the house, and how that location works with the circulation and people-traffic from other rooms. If you want your kitchen to be the central hub of activity, then allow for a more open-plan layout. But if you want a traditional separate kitchen, then the living area or dining table should be more of a segregated hub.
Once questions of orientation, natural light and placement are settled, you can focus on the furniture and units. Think about layout and flow before you get into specifying details such as lighting, visual style, colours, floor finishes, sinks and worktops
Planning for renovations
If you are remodelling an existing kitchen, you’ll probably not have the same freedom as with a self build to consider the orientation or placement within the house. However, this doesn’t mean that the only solution is to mimic and replace the existing layout with new units.
Start with the fundamentals, particularly natural light and circulation, and work out how people currently move through the house to the kitchen and where you want key items placed for ease and visual appeal.
“On one of my recent projects, an L-shaped arrangement of kitchen units against a side and rear wall of a house was removed and the customer initially wanted to simply replace with new,” says Hugo. “The room was quite dark and this was largely because the window in the rear wall over the old sink was quite small. Our rearrangement kept the back wall free and created a separate kitchen island, with units only against the side wall. This enabled the back wall to be opened out with full height folding sliding glass doors – this was the key to completely transforming the space.”
Don’t overcomplicate
Integral to any design is to keep the lines as simple as possible, whether your style is minimal or country kitchen. It’s pretty easy to add detail if you want a more ornate look, but a kitchen should work as seamlessly as possible – so group your full height units together and keep worktops in long continuous runs. This is particularly important in older buildings, as there are likely to be more nooks, crannies and awkward corners.
For the full feature buy the April 2010 issue of Build It
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