Kitchen Layout

Designing the kitchen layout requires the maximum amount of thought and planning. There are many different functional areas in a kitchen. The ‘main’ areas are for food preparation, cooking and cleaning. Then there are the ‘extras’. You might want to use the kitchen, say for laundry. So you would need a washing machine, dryer, and/or space for ironing. You would want all of these to fit in well and the different work spaces to flow comfortably into one another. So the kitchen plan requires a large amount of functionality well integrated in a limited space… AND it must all look gorgeous at the end of it!

The Kitchen We Were Given:

It was a regular kitchen, with platforms on opposite walls. If you go back to all our planning discussions you will recall that Missus wanted a big kitchen… to include the ‘main’ areas and the ‘extras’.

Here we start to plan:

We extended the kitchen outwards a little, and this is what we got.

Missus wanted an ironing counter in the kitchen, which we managed to fit in quite well. The hob stayed where it was. It is facing eastwards and Missus wanted to keep that direction. It is recommended by Vastu, that when a person cooks food he/she face the east. This layout also had a great work triangle. Because the entrance wall of the original kitchen was a column, we could not remove it. We used it instead as a visual divider to separate the ‘main’ cooking area from ‘extra’ supporting areas.

We were all quite pleased with this… and then Missus got a little greedier. There was a small store room planned to the right of the kitchen. She said she didn’t want that… She would rather have that space in the kitchen.

So we reworked the kitchen layout and we got this…

Now we had a clean entrance to the kitchen. The fridge went one side so it would not block the entrance whenever open. A few more discussions and site visits got me doing the last bit of detailing and we got..

The Final Kitchen Layout:

Once the entrance wall was made I realized the fridge/ironing passage is much narrower on site than in the plan. You would have to almost touch the wall at the back to open the fridge. So I shifted the fridge to the right, in place of the ironing counter.
The kitchen is quite a distance from the home entrance. This means that every time someone rings the bell you have to go right around to open the door. I added a small service window with access to the outside so you can receive all deliveries / letters / courier from the kitchen itself.
Missus makes breakfast and packs lunch boxes for the kids on school mornings while they eat breakfast outside. I added a breakfast counter at the kitchen entrance. Missus is most excited about getting another 20 minutes with the kids while they have their breakfast in the kitchen with her.