Think back to your childhood. I’ll bet you have some warm, fuzzy memories of spending time in the kitchen with family. Maybe you made cookies with your mom or baked a cake with your grandmother that sent sweet aromas wafting through the house. I can remember waking up on Sunday mornings and taking in the wonderful perfume of a large pot of tomato sauce simmering on the stove. Like the sirens of ancient mythology, the best kitchens call to us with their warmth, their pleasures, and their memories.
But since our childhood, kitchens have changed dramatically. Now, aesthetics matter as much as function. When designing your kitchen, you can agonize for hours over whether to use dark wood, light wood, or white cabinets. The best choices reflect your personality. You can choose traditional draws, sliding shelves, even lazy Susans within a cabinet, all intended to make pots and pans and other kitchen implements more accessible. All serve to make your house hum.
Appliances call for another few hours of decision making. Retro red would spice up an otherwise drab kitchen and tell the world that you love life on the slightly wild side. On the other hand, stainless steel says you’re cool, hip, and organized. Color choices in the kitchen can really set the tone for your entire house and make it the heart of your home.
How you lay out your kitchen depends on you and how you move around your kitchen to prepare a meal. The best layouts will accommodate your cooking methods and where you like to stand while you cook. This is your house and your kitchen so personalize it Arrange your work area so that your stove, sink, refrigerator, and preparation areas all lie within a few steps of each other. That way you can wash those veggies, cut and chop, and slice and dice within inches of the stove where you’ll have to cook and stir them while preparing other dishes.
And don’t forget the lighting. Somehow, that happens to come at the bottom of everyone’s to-do list, but it has such importance. I love traditional lighting fixtures, but they aren’t always the best choice for every kitchen. New, trendy track lighting works well in many kitchens because of its adaptability. New LEO lights provide bright, cool, inexpensive and ecologically responsible light. You can bend the track into attractive shapes to focus the light on key spots in your kitchen like your work area
So much goes into designing the heart of your house, and this process can prove daunting for some, but it’s an adventure. Believe me, I know from personal experience, but I have the best kitchen in the world.