If you are planning and designing a kitchen from scratch, there are a few things to keep in mind. You may have already decided upon the appliances that you are going to install, you may have decided on flooring, tiles, and so on, but the most important thing about a kitchen, beside how good it looks, is how well it functions.
A kitchen is, first and foremost, a room where you are going to spend a lot of time, and it needs to work with you rather than against you. If you are forever running backwards and forwards between the cooker and the fridge, or the preparation worktops and the cooker, you can find yourself spending far more time chasing around than you need to.
Indeed, many people design the kitchen starting from the sink. Although this may date from the days before we had dishwashers, it is still a good rule of thumb. A good place to put the sink is in front of a window because this can give you some peace and relaxation if you can see the birds on the bird table while you are scrubbing the burnt-on pastry off the Pyrex dishes. On the other hand, if you live in a flat and overlook the high street, you may want to site the sink away from the window rather than looking at a constant stream of passing traffic.
A kitchen island is where a lot of meal preparation happens, so if your plan is going to include an island you need to consider exactly where it is going to sit because you don’t want to find it is getting in the way as you need to go to the fridge, then to the cooker, and so on. You may also use the island as a dining table, and if so, it will take up even more space.
The cooker and oven need to be on an exterior wall because if you are going to include ventilation it is much easier to arrange. Adding ventilation to a cooker in an island is going to be much more complex, and expensive to boot.
You also need to give great consideration to storage. Pots and pans need to be near to the cooker and food preparation area so that you can simply select the one that you need and fill it with your chopped veg straight away, then plonk it on the hob ready to go when everything else is prepared. Again, you don’t want to be running from one side of the kitchen to another.
Give some consideration to shelving. It is easy to see and grab whatever you need when it is on an easy to reach shelf, rather than fumbling around on your knees because the item you need is at the back of a cabinet.
It really is worthwhile spending a lot of time thinking about exactly where everything will go, because once your kitchen is constructed you can’t change it around again.
Of course, one of the most important features of a new kitchen is the worktops because they are going to take up a fair amount of space and will be an important feature. At Marble & Granite we provide a number of different stones, both natural and man-made, and we find that one of the most popular choices is marble worktops in London. It is an amazing natural stone and has an elegant sheen that is unequalled in any other stone such as granite, quartz, and so on.
Believe it or not, marble is made out of sea-shells – crabs, lobsters, clams, oysters, mussels, and many more – which over millions of years are broken down to form limestone. This undergoes changes under pressure and heat in the earth’s crust and finally becomes marble. The veining and patterns and colours are all the result of other minerals that are included, since pure marble is white.
Marble is a relatively soft rock, and your marble worktops will need to be sealed because otherwise staining can occur. However, provided that you take care of them, they will continue to emit that glorious sheen in your kitchen and last you for years.
