How to create a timeless kitchen that you will still love in 30 years:
- Visualize a kitchen that you would be happy to live in.
- Create it.
- Ignore the trends for the next 30 years, and happily live your life.
Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple.
If it was, everyone would do it. But there are a few things that can help you make the design decisions that you will love. Kitchens might be high-stakes, but they don’t have to be scary.
It is not so much about somehow designing the perfect kitchen that will magically outperform trends. It is more about lifting our minds above the way cheap, disposable fashion has altered how we think about things that should be neither cheap nor disposable. In this case: kitchens.
“It is not so much about somehow designing the perfect kitchen that will magically outperform trends. It is more about lifting our minds above the way cheap, disposable fashion has altered how we think about things that should be neither cheap nor disposable. In this case: kitchens.”
My favorite tips:
Designing a beautiful non-trendy kitchen is less about color, hardware, and door style as it is about getting the bones right. Resist the temptation to simply cram a cabinet into every available corner. Give thought to symmetry, quiet space, function, and form. Agonize over the placement of your refrigerator. Don’t create lots of opportunity for hoarding clutter, because clutter does not lend itself to a happy, peaceful life. Consider instead a quiet bank of orderly pantry cabinets that house most of your food supplies and dishes and allow for sparse design elsewhere. Create statement areas and allow the rest of the cabinetry to be plain and simple. Avoid angles, arched cabinet doors, and 45’d corners and instead embrace strong, straight lines wherever possible.
Lift your eyes above the Pinterest boards and allow yourself to love oak if you love oak. I love oak, too.
A few more things I like to take into consideration before designing your kitchen:
- Where is the house located, and where does the light in the kitchen come from?
- How is the rest of the house styled? Or is the house styled at all, or likely to be able to sustain carefully placed decor? Are there young boys with baseball bats running through the house, is what I’m saying.
- What things do you love? Are you chicken tikka masala or chicken fingers? Black and white or colorful? Forward thinking or in love with retro? All these things and many more need to factor into the design of your space in order to make it yours.
- What is your budget? I always want to work within budget parameters from the start and not design something you will love but your bank account will never forgive you for. Let’s get the expectations straight right out of the gate.
Our goal is always to create a comfortable, inspiring place for you to work.
For some of you that is a simple, rather plain kitchen. For others it involves a fair amount of old, loved things. And still others of you want to feel like you are surrounded by centuries of great cooks, beaming at you from behind ornate cornices and reminding you to add salt from their perch on elaborate open shelves.
We are different, that’s ok, and it’s normal.
It isn’t, I humbly suggest, ok to treat our kitchens as disposable works of art. And if you are going to do this, let’s do it right.
