Zoning

In my experience, the most successful kitchens I’ve designed have been those where I’ve used the concept of "zoning"..

What is zoning?

I investigate my clients’ lifestyle and design a kitchen accordingly by creating zones for certain activities & storage. For example, those who do juicing daily get a juicing zone – an area where the juicer fits easily and is near to the sink & waste-disposal. Those who drink tea & coffee a lot get a "coffee zone" – an area where the kettle / coffeemaker sits, with a cabinet next or above for mugs & cups, tea & coffee. I like to fit these areas into a roll-up cabinet – or make a feature out of them by leaving them open (doorless) and cover the sides and back with contrasting materials, such as hardwood, glass or aluminium. They become a sort of window – see examples below.

The next stage is to zone storage: how many pans and cookware you have? More importantly, how many do you need? Anything you don’t need, give away or put them on the top shelves. Depending on what sort of lifestyle you lead, zone your grocery into groups  – biscuits & treats, breakfast stuff, pulses,  pasta, baking etc… then think of them as cabinets. Then do the same with pots, plates, glasses, utensils, cutlery etc. By now you’ll have a pretty good idea how many cabinets you’ll need.

Then you have to zone the activity areas. Think about where you need the spices most, where you use plates the most, where you prepare food, where you make coffee. Also, do you bake cakes, do you juice, do you use a bread-maker? If you do any of these regularly, these small appliances will need to have their own permanent areas. 

When you’ve considered all the above, you’ll need to translate it into a spatial format.  Get a piece of paper and draw elevations of your walls – not a plan!  Elevations are front, vertical views of walls – as opposed to a floor plan. Then cut out the cabinets from another piece of paper  (obviously the drawing scale and cabinet scale should be the same – i.e. if your elevation is 1:10, so should be your cabinets) – and start arranging them with your zoning in mind.  Make sure your zones are as near as possible to the kitchen appliance they require – i.e. a juicing zone should be next to the sink, the tea & coffee cabinet next to the coffee making machine and so on… Eventually things will fit together, like a puzzle, and you’ll get to a pretty good arrangement  – although sometimes you’ll have to compromise, but that’s part of the game.

When you remodel a small kitchen, zoning is even more important – you might need to have double-functioning zones, but only do this if it’s not too much of a hassle to change from one activity to the other  – otherwise you’ll give up on one of them, for sure!

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Examples::

(more to come…)