Choosing Furniture for Your Kitchen

Guest post by Metris Kitchens kitchen
Creating luxury kitchens designed here in the UK

The trend towards open-plan modern kitchens, leading to multi-use areas combining living and dining areas, demands more than ever that kitchens are well-planned in advance. Many kitchens are now used not just for food preparation and cooking but also for eating, hosting social events, and providing areas for play, work and study.
Accordingly, we need to choose the right furniture and storage options to make sure the demands we ask of our kitchens are met. This is not always so easy, but our tips below will help guide you towards making the right choices.

Large Kitchen Furniture

Large kitchens provide not only more opportunities for cooking but also for creating areas for dining, relaxing, working and entertaining. Large kitchens can take advantage of multifunctional islands. Islands, often used for food prep and washing, can be quickly transformed into the ideal place for casual dining with a set of bar stools.

Small Kitchens

Small kitchens can still be used as social spaces. Clever use of worktops, colours and lighting can help in a smaller property perform more uses and create an illusion of greater space. In the kitchen below, the designers have used glass and steel to create a lively, functional space in a relatively small area.

Social Kitchens

As we continue to eat in increasing numbers, the aforementioned kitchen islands offer home chefs the opportunity to entertain or cook as a performance for guests seated at a nearby table or sofa.

Tables allow people to be seated when eating in a formal capacity, but they also provide a platform from which to serve hors d’oeuvre, tapas and other more informal food. Tables that are not being used directly for food – such as during an evening party – can still be used to great effect by simply using a throw or candles to create atmosphere.

Family Kitchens

When a kitchen is to be used by the whole family, it is important to consider storage for children’s books and toys. Where you place this storage will determine the accessibility a child has to its contents – it could be up high and out of reach, or down low and accessible.

Safety, maintenance and durability of components will also be key considerations when choosing furniture for a family-friendly kitchen. Many younger children also enjoy helping parents and relatives in the kitchen. Lowered tables and worktops can help children feel more involved in the preparation of meals in the family.

Home Office Kitchens

Many kitchens now double up as places to work or study. As with family kitchens storage is a key consideration, as is the selection of seating available in the kitchen. Whilst breakfast bar stools may be ideal for short sessions, longer sessions of reading may be better conducted in the comfort of a sofa or swivel chair. Flexible working and the increasing use of multimedia devices in the kitchen area have led to such seating becoming more common in kitchens.

It is also worth considering the storage of cables and the various power packs required to use any working devices. Pop-up sockets can provide a great way of powering devices when required, and then be hidden away afterwards.

Activity Zones

With so many potential uses, the kitchen is very often broken down into different activity zones. Clever design and use of style will help tie the different zones together into a single, thematically-consistent room.
The picture below illustrates how a granite island helps ‘bridge’ the space between the cooking and eating areas of the kitchen.

Whilst this is predominantly a modern kitchen design, the principles remain the same regardless of kitchen style – plan ahead, consider how you want to use your kitchen, consider how it may be used in future, and purchase furniture and fittings that are consistent with the style of the kitchen. Furniture of every style and colour can be sourced to complement your kitchen cabinetry.