Design Tips
How to Design the Perfect Kitchen
The Heart of the Home
The kitchen is possibly the most important room in any home, with its primary function being the place where we store our food and create our meals, but as we all know the kitchen is far more than that. It’s a place where we gather as a family after a busy day, where we catch up with friends, and it’s often the centre stage when it comes to entertaining. Both the kitchen and pantry require a lot of attention to ensure it suits our needs, whilst making the best use of the allocated space within our homes’ floor plan.
The perfect kitchen is a hard thing to define, James Treble has travelled to Milan for the International Fair of Interior Design many times and has fallen in love with plenty of amazing kitchens with high-end finishes, but that doesn’t mean these designs would be the ones he’d have in his own home. Despite its looks, the right kitchen is the one that is tailored to satisfy the needs of each home.
With this in mind, module 3 of James Trebles online design course covers all the fundamental elements of understanding and designing functional kitchens, including the finishes and surfaces options, the appliances, the layout and the style, so that you will be better informed when deciding which kitchen is in fact ideal for your home.
This article is a excerpt from Module 3 which will teach you how to design the perfect kitchen and pantry for your home.
The Kitchen Triangle
When designing kitchens it is always best to start with the design of the space prior to selecting any finishes. The main reason for this is that the layout of the kitchen and how it functions is actually far more important than how it looks. There are three main zones within every kitchen no matter how large or small the space, these are the food storage area (fridge and pantry) the cooking area (cooktop and oven) and the cleaning & preparation area (the sink). These three spaces need to be functional within themselves whilst also relating to each other, easily accessible as you move from one space to the next during your kitchen experience, not only for comfort but also for safety.
The Kitchen Triangle is the imaginary path which defines how these three working zones connect to each other. The main concept is to ensure there is a clear unobstructed access between the three zones and that these are kept within a realistically close distance. The dimensions of this triangle will differ in almost every kitchen depending upon its layout but being aware of this simple shape is paramount in helping you create a functional and practical kitchen layout.
The Kitchen Triangle Variation
The kitchen triangle was designed to maximise the utility of the kitchen for one person moving around the kitchen. But in modern times the kitchen has become central to entertaining and socialising. The kitchen triangle concept can also be applied for designing a kitchen where communal cooking and entertainment is how your kitchen will be used.
In this instance you can use the kitchen triangle to organise the space into preparation zones, cooking zones, and serving zones.
Case Study – The Contemporary Kitchen Redesign
To help clarify and explain some of the information you will learn in Module 3 of James Trebles online design course, we provide ‘case studies’ of kitchens designed by James to better explain the design and selection process and how he dealt with different issues along the way. These are real kitchens, each with quite different character, layouts, finishes and appliances, resulting in highly functional kitchens that are also visually pleasing.
This is case study is a kitchen located in a very large four-bedroom double-storey home, which has three separate living areas including a very generous open plan living dining and kitchen. In addition to this, the designated kitchen area included a walk-in pantry as well as a butler’s pantry, requiring lots of cabinetry and a functional design to best utilise all that space.
The process
James started by analysing the floor plans, to identify any problem areas, start considering the placement of the key items and ensure there is a comfortable flow through the space. His next concern is how the room is viewed from the rest of the open-plan space and that it doesn’t visually clash with the living and entertaining areas.
Now that you are an expert in the kitchen triangle concept, can you see the problem in the original floor plan for this home?
The before and after images of the floor plan show the subtle changes which opened up many design possibilities. After confirming that James was able to relocate the plumbing points, as well as the electrical layout, some non-structural walls which affected the new layout could be moved.
Whilst every home is different, sometimes one thing stands out as the biggest issue, and in this home’s original floor plan, it was the fridge space – both it’s location and size.
The Fridge Space
In the original design of this home, you can see that the width of the allocated fridge space limited the size of the fridge which could be a problem as such a large house might require a large fridge.
Also looking at the kitchen triangle the original position of the fridge meant you had to walk around the corner of the bench to access the fridge – a small but important detail in designing a functional kitchen.
To fix this issue James flipped the pantry layout and move the door across by shifting a non-structural wall. This created more space for a larger fridge whilst moving the fridge across making access smooth and easy from both the cooking and preparation zones. The new position of the pantry door also means that you can easily access dry goods from the pantry as easilty as cold goods from the fridge.
Once the layout was designed correctly, James then went into the selections including cabinets, fixtures, appliances, and tiles. The resulting kitchen is shown below.
Want more Kitchen Design Tips?
This article was based on just one of the hundreds of practial design tips included in James Trebles “Practical Design” online course.
If you want to learn how to should design your dream kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, loungeroom or even an entire house then why not check out the course – or you can try a figure it out on your own by rearranging the cushions for the 100th time! The choice is yours.