Four Kitchen Design Elements That Will Make You Feel Like You’re A Top Chef
The right kitchen design can make cooking an absolute joy. If you want to feel like a real professional when you slice, dice, and cook for your family, consider including these chef-inspired design elements in your kitchen.
A Built-in Cutting Board with a Garbage Hole
It’s hard to feel like a chef if you have to dig a cutting board out from the cupboard and carry your scraps across the kitchen to the trashcan every time you want to slice some veggies. A built-in cutting board makes this process a lot smoother. If you can arrange your lower cupboards so that there is space for a trash can under the cutting board, this is even better. Including a small hole in the cutting board design allows you to push your scraps right through the hole and into the trash.
Since a built-in cutting board is harder to replace than a loose one, you’ll need to make sure you choose one that’s durable and high-quality. Some of the best woods to choose are maple, walnut and cherry. These woods are very tight-grained, which allows them to stand up to plenty of knife work, and they’re not overly porous, so they’re easy to clean.
A Hanging Pot Rack
If you watch chefs cook on television, you’ll often see them grab a pot or pan off of a hanging rack near the stove. They never dig their pans out from drawers! There are two main styles of pot racks to consider for your kitchen. One mounts to the ceiling and allows you to hang pots and pans from dangling hooks. This is a good choice if you have tall ceilings that allow you enough space so you don’t hit your head on the pots. The other variety mounts to the wall; if you have low ceilings, this is the better choice.
A Pot Filling Sprayer at Your Stove
Lugging a big pot of pasta water from the sink to the stove is no fun at all. A wall-mounted sprayer nozzle makes it easy to fill pots directly on the stove. Keep in mind that your plumbing may have to be reworked if you want to have this type of attachment installed. Depending on the current arrangement of your kitchen and the locations of your pipes, this may be a simple task, or it may be a time-consuming and costly one.
A good alternative, if you cannot easily run a tap to your stove, is to make one of your sinks a deep pot sink. At least, then, you can easily fit pots in the sink without having to tip them.
A Bar-Height Kitchen Island With A Cooktop
Nothing makes you feel like a professional chef more than cooking for an audience. Even if you don’t plan on doing all of your cooking on an island, including a kitchen island with a small cooktop in your design gives you a space to cook and entertain at the same time. A nice way to arrange this design is with a cooktop and granite counter on one side of the island, and a finished wooden bartop on the other side of the island.
Add some under-counter refrigeration to your island if you really want to go over the top. You can also ensure the seating side of the island sits just a little higher than the cooktop side, so your audience can easily look down at what you’re cooking.
If you enjoy cooking at home, you deserve to have a kitchen that makes it as seamless and enjoyable as possible — for both you and your guests. Whether you use one, two, or all of the ideas above, the resulting kitchen is sure to have a chef-inspired feel that makes it pleasant to cook in. You can start looking for these features at a kitchen and bath hardware store like MCK Kitchen & Bath.
