From stylish splashbacks to quality fixtures and perfectly positioned lighting, a lot goes into designing your dream kitchen. As the heart of your home, you want to make sure you ace this space.
We’ve spoken with kitchen design experts to outline seven steps you need to follow to create a kitchen that’s both functional and aesthetic.
1. Ace the Layout
Behind every good kitchen is a good layout. An efficient layout is one where you are able to draw a triangle between your fridge, oven/stove, and sink. These are the three main areas in your kitchen and you want to be able to move between them with ease.
It’s important you ace this when designing your dream kitchen. No matter how beautiful your splashback and pendant lights are, it won’t matter if your kitchen is inefficient.
2. Plan the Plumbing
One very important, but often forgotten part of the renovation/design process is the plumbing. According to experts from Book A Plumber Online, many novice kitchen designers blow their budget because they haven’t properly planned out the plumbing.
If you’re renovating your old kitchen, you’ll save a lot of money by using your existing plumbing. Moving pipes and gas lines around can involve quite a bit of labour and parts, which means you’ll have less to spend on reaching your interior design dreams.
If you’re designing a kitchen from scratch, get in touch with a qualified and experienced plumber. They’ll know the best way to plan the plumbing for your kitchen space.
3. Find Your Perfect Style for this Space
A good kitchen also has a cohesive style that works with the rest of your home. This means settling on one style and sticking to it.
We’ve all got a Pinterest board with our favourite kitchen designs pinned and this is a great place to start. Are you more drawn to dark and moody, industrial styles? Or maybe the more light and white scandi style?
Whatever the case, pick a style now – this will influence all your aesthetic choices from here on!
4. Choose Your Appliances
Now that you know the style you’re working towards in your dream kitchen, it’s time to select your appliances. Selecting these early on means you can plan the rest of your kitchen to fit. Planning the rest of your kitchen before choosing your appliances means you’re limited just to what can fit in the space you’ve allocated.
5. Pick Your Cabinetry and Benchtops
There’s no such thing as too much storage in the kitchen. When picking out your cabinetry and benchtops, you need to do more than just get the color and style right.
What benchtop height and depth do you need? And are you allowing enough clearance space for those appliances you selected in step four?
These details might sound minor, but get these wrong and your dream kitchen might turn into a nightmare.
6. Arrange the Lighting
All rooms, kitchens included, need two types of lighting to be functional – task lighting and ambient lighting. First, you need bright, direct task lighting around your work area so you can see what you’re cooking.
The kitchen is more than just a room we prepare meals in now, though. We often seat our guests in the kitchen for a coffee or like to spend our mornings with a cuppa at the island bench.
For situations like these, you want to create a welcoming and relaxing environment with softer, warmer ambience lighting. The combination of task and ambient lighting in this room is key to making it the heart of your home.
7. Finalize the Details
What makes dream kitchens so dreamy in the first place? After you’ve got the fundamentals down, it’s all in the details.
Does the metal of your pendant lights match the finish of your tapware and handles on your cabinets? Do you have a spice drawer that’s perfectly set up to see the labels at just a glance? Or maybe your pantry has slide-out shelves so you don’t need to struggle to reach the back.
Whatever the case, finalizing the details of your dream kitchen renovation is hugely important in succeeding here. Whether you’re going at it alone or have help from an experienced kitchen designer, these steps will ensure your success in moving your dream kitchen ideas from a mood board to reality.