Kitchen and Worktop Designs to Suit Your Cooking Style
Designing your kitchen often means you take into account a few factors: your personal tastes, any design theme that your home may have, the shape and size of the room, and last but not least, the type of cooking you are likely to do. The latter may not seem like an important factor in kitchen design, but the placement of appliances and cupboards goes hand in hand with efficient food creation, which is why you need to tailor your layout to your cooking style.
Cooking or Company?
You may be someone who has a passion for cooking; doing it for recreational purposes as well as feeding yourself and your family and friends, or you may be someone who only cooks when they need to, preferring to use the kitchen as a secondary living room of sorts. If you fall into the former category, then appliance placement and type should be at the forefront of any kitchen design decisions – situating the oven, fridge, dishwasher in the ideal places to ensure you don’t have to weave around the kitchen carrying plates and pans. What’s your Style?
We’ve already mentioned that some people are more interested in cooking than others, but of these cooking fans, there will be many styles and preferences. Certain layouts will lend themselves better to certain cooking styles:
From scratch: If you are a person who likes to make a lot of food from scratch; whether it’s bread, sauces, cakes or other desserts, you will need a lot of room to place your ingredients and utensils without interfering with other appliances or running out of space.
Complex dishes: Creating extravagant meals or meals for a large number of people can require a lot of room and also sophisticated appliances. Consider the type and placement of the appliances: is the oven capable of handling the preparation and cooking processes? Is it easily accessible and well placed, relative to the location of other appliances?
Workstations or Triangles?
The placement of stoves, fridges and sinks traditionally adhered to a triangle shape, with each feature at a different point. However, with more kitchen appliances becoming commonplace and serious cooking fans wanting to have all their equipment available to them instantly, there is also the option of workstations, containing sections dedicated to different tasks (cooking, storage, preparation).Appliances
If you cook for recreational purposes as well as just at meal times, then you may know better than most about the importance of having the right appliances for the different meals you want to create. Certain types of cuisine require certain appliances – slow cookers and steamers for example, so there needs to be enough surface area to house these appliances simultaneously so you can cook efficiently without having to put things away and take things out as and when you need them. If you’re using heavy duty or large pans, for example, you may feel it is best to have a dishwasher close to the food preparation area so you can quickly and easily place the utensils in there once you have finished using them.
Shape
Freedom to move around in a kitchen is ideal for people that like to cook and people who like to use their kitchen for socialising. Ensuring that worktops do not obstruct movement is important, so look at U-shaped and L-shaped kitchens. In particular, U-shaped kitchens provide a lot of space and also allow for socialising, thanks to the large surface area of the worktops serving as a bar of sorts, for people to sit at or lean on. Alternatively, the larger worktops can be used to place cooking utensils and appliances on. Lighting
Whether you’re a budding chef or a great host, lighting is very important for kitchens of all types. Mood lighting is a fantastic idea for more social environments, whereas you might want more powerful, carefully placed lighting to assist you with food preparation and cooking. There are countless innovative ways to illuminate your kitchen as you would like to, from the aforementioned mood lighting to ambient, accent and decorative solutions.
At Touchstone Worktops, we understand the importance of the kitchen in terms of the purpose it serves and the way it needs to look. That’s why we provide quartz, granite, marble and natural stone worktops of the highest quality to our customers. If you would like to know more about what we do, please get in touch with us today and we will be more than happy to help you.