Design Ideas For Your Kitchen

The family kitchen is the place where everyone inevitably gathers

. It's the heart of the home. Yet when it comes to designing the kitchen, few homeowners take advantage of the kitchen's emotional appeal. By using colours, materials and finishes that prompt an emotional as well as an aesthetic response, you can add appealing warmth to the room. You won't have to sacrifice function, either. Modern furnishings and finishes make it easy to design a contemporary kitchen with a family-oriented style.

The best kitchens begin with a sound design plan, one fashioned around the lifestyle of those who use the room the most. Most designers begin by addressing the "kitchen triangle," the spatial relationship between the stove, refrigerator and the sink. The recommended distances between these most-used features is four to eight feet. This ideal configuration can be difficult to achieve in a large kitchen. When the cook feels at sea in an expansive kitchen, the right furniture can become an island in the storm.

Kitchen islands are popular in family kitchens because they are accessible from all sides. They offer a place for the family to congregate while adding functional space for the cook. In today's open floor plans, islands also provide a physical and visual barrier between the kitchen and adjoining spaces.

As popular as kitchen islands are, however, their size presents specific design challenges. It's important to ensure that a kitchen island's mass doesn't weigh down the space. For a kitchen that invites friends and family to gather, kitchen islands that look more like dining furniture than blocks of cabinets are more appealing. Fashioned with natural materials and presented with a sleek silhouette, they add both warmth and function to the kitchen.

Homewares such as coordinated drawer pulls, cabinet knobs and towel rails and can help give the kitchen island the feel of an old-fashioned kitchen table. Hardware finishes like oil-rubbed bronze or brushed nickel have a richness and depth that when throughout the kitchen, adds a sense of history, complexity and cohesion to the entire space.

Borrowing elements from the dining room not only helps tie in the kitchen with the rest of the home but makes a kitchen look more like natural living space. Including chairs or stools that coordinate with the home's dining room furniture helps give the kitchen a homey feeling. An open kitchen hutch displaying colourful china and crockery enhances the look. For a kitchen that adds an emotional appeal to family cooking, the design goal is to create a room that looks less like a laboratory and more like home.

Copyright (c) 2012 Super A-Mart

by: Sam Martin

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