Kitchen Design Information
The design of a kitchen should be based foremost on your needs for that particular space. If you do a lot of cooking that involves extensive preparation, your ideal kitchen plan will be different from someone who mainly uses the kitchen for preparing frozen food. The starting point for any effective kitchen design is a thorough assessment of your expectations from the final result. Does this Spark an idea?
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Comprehensive Assessment
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Several questions should be answered during the assessment stage to make designing your kitchen go more smoothly and successfully. Among the elements that should be contained among these questions are things like storage space requirements, whether your kitchen will be self contained or become part of a more open area that includes a dining room or bar, an expectation of other activities that the kitchen will be used for and an estimate of how many years you should expect to live in the house and use the kitchen.
Layouts and Floor Plans
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A kitchen can be designed in a circular fashion or even as a two-story experiment, but in most cases your kitchen design will follow one of several traditional layouts. Designing a kitchen must take into account which of these layouts will most effectively utilize available space while also creating the most efficient use. These layouts include the single line layout utilizing just one wall, the L-shape design, the U-shape design, the galley floor plan that places cabinets on facing walls and some kind of island layout in which there is a central workstation at which most cooking functions are performed.
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Lighting
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Lighting is a component of kitchen design easily overlooked that should instead become a central element of your plan. A single overhead light may be fine for a small kitchen area, but larger designs call for specific additions, like task lighting over the areas of food preparation. Skylights that draw in natural lighting can enhance the feeling of comfortability inside a kitchen, thereby making it a more welcoming place to spend time. Lighting beneath your cabinets can help to illuminate darkened areas and also provide a more pleasing aesthetic quality.
Work Triangle
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Another traditional aspect of kitchen design is the work triangle. This term refers to the placement of your cooking appliances, sink and refrigerator. According to Terence Conran in his "House and Garden Design Projects," the ideal placement of these three kitchen elements should be no more than two armspans from each other while also being placed far enough from each other to avoid being cramped.
Flooring
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Flooring is another significant aspect of kitchen design that may be subject to neglect. The choice of flooring material should integrate naturally into the overall style of your kitchen, but functional properties should also come into play. Linoleum is durable, easily installed and available in a number of designs. Rubber flooring allows you to introduce vivid and bold colors and provides much greater comfort during long periods of preparation and cooking time than materials like terracotta or ceramic tiles. Cork serves as a much more affordable alternative to hardwood that is easily maintained if properly sealed and polished.
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References
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