Kitchen remodeling::space

Tips & ideas

As I wrote in the previous article, the second most important element in remodeling a kitchen is space.
The kitchen is the heart of the home. Not only is this the place where you prepare food to keep your body going – but it’s a place where you can share your life with others whilst cooking & eating..

So do not separate the kitchen totally from other parts of your home – if the space is big enough, provide a seating area or a breakfast table or at least a breakfast bar. If the kitchen is spatially too small to have a bar or small table, try to make it open directly onto the dining / sitting room so that you can interact with people whilst you cook. read more about small kitchen remodeling.

Lot’s of people don’t like the idea of a kitchen/diner and they prefer a separate dining room. I have seen many interiors where the dining room is located at the other side of the house to the kitchen. This is crazy! I cannot imagine walking through the corridor with hot plates… or sitting down and remembering that I’ve left something in the kitchen.  It would drive me bananas. But more importantly it’s not practical. Of course I’m talking here about the average size house, in which most of us live – if you have a huge estate, with cooks, servants and maids – that’s a complete different scenario!

If you want a formal dining room, make sure it’s next to the kitchen or it opens into the kitchen – you can always have folding or sliding doors to divide the spaces or when you don’t want to see mountains of washing-up-to-do after a meal.

If you’re remodeling your kitchen, before you replace the current one, think about whether it’s in the right place.  A kitchen should be as near as possible to the entrance door of your home or at least have a side door to your driveway/garage. As we’ve established above, it should be located next to or open directly onto a "social" room ( dining/ sitting room). When people remodel interiors they tend to go with the same layout they had before. Try to free your mind to think about how you inhabit a space. In the case of a kitchen, think about the way you cook, the way you organize things, the way you like things to be. If you’re not into cooking and baking – you will not need a double-oven. If you cook everyday, you need a big work-surface. If you have kids, you need separate cabinets for treats and stuff (in easy reach or not? – this is up to you too.) If you hate cleaning, you should not have pots & jars on display.

You should then zone your cooking & kitchen stuff the way you cook and store. You can read more about zoning in the kitchen. 

When you zone your kitchen habits, you should think about the work surface – or the worktop. When I enter a kitchen, I always know whether it was designed by a man or a woman. Men tend to design kitchen worktops  in an ordered kind of way – a bit of worktop, then comes the cooktop (or hob), then a bit of worktop again, then the sink and so on. A woman doesn’t cook like this – women need a long, uninterrupted work surface to lay out and prepare things. So always opt for a long worktop in one piece – ideally about 7-6 feet ( 2-3m) but minimum 5 feet long (1.5m).

Islands are great for having a long worktop. They can also be used as a breakfast bar, a room divider – not to mention the storage underneath. It’s also sensible to have a sink (perhaps a secondary one) within them for food preparation.

All kitchen appliances should be located near to their function. A dishwasher should be next to the kitchen sink. Your "plates" cabinet should be near the dishwasher or dining table. Your spice cabinet should be near the hob.
The fridge should be near a work-surface to put things down when you take them out. If possible, have a double oven at eye level. But it must be installed into a cabinet that is near to a worktop – imagine taking out a hot dish from the oven and have to walk to the other side of the room to put it down… now look at some trendy magazine kitchen ad –  aren’t those ovens located miles away from a worktop? (another example of why not to copy magazine pictures – they are there to seduce you!)

Then think about your gadgets. How many do you use everyday? Only those should be on display. The other ones can be put into a "gadgets" cabinet – you can even have them behind a sliding door, or in a roll-up unit – plugged in and ready to use. The same applies to mugs, jars, plates, spices etc. Don’t have them on open shelves – unless you use them all the time (they’ll just get sticky and greasy). But I’ll write about this aspect in the kitchen decor article.

In short, space & place are important – where you put a kitchen in a house and where you put things in a kitchen. The third element that is important in remodeling a kitchen is time. As in everything in life, time & space are related, so how much time you spend in your kitchen should affect the way you redesign the space.