Designing your home can be an exciting and astonishing journey. The kitchen is often deemed the very heart of your home, and therefore needs to be designed with careful planning and consideration. The kitchen also needs to be safe and functional as this is where food, water, fire and electricity are all used at the same time!
Where to Start?
The first thing you need to decide on is the layout. To a great extent this will be decided by the shape of your room, but variations are possible, along the classic lines of:
• Single Wall
• Galley
• U Shaped
• L Shaped
• G Shaped
Recently, the use of full height cupboards at the wall and islands has led to simplified worktop formats and big islands, often with interesting shapes.
Style and Colour choice
The next question will be the units – contemporary or traditional? If traditional, in-frame or standard doors? The choice will be dictated both by your taste and budget.
Once the unit style is established, you will need to look at the colour. There is massive variety in kitchen unit colour and finish these days.
Kitchen Worktop Surfaces
The colour of your granite or quartz kitchen worktops has to work with your walls and cabinets. Home owners choose both highly contrasting shades, and closely matching worktops. In general, traditional kitchens are best topped with natural or natural-looking materials, while clearly man-made looking quartz worktops suit contemporary kitchens. But the choice is yours.
The ideal material for your new kitchen worktop should be durable – water and heat resistant, tough against breakage, scratching and chipping, and with good stain resistance. It should not be conducive to the growth of bacteria or fungi. It should also be low maintenance.
Many materials match some of these criteria, but there is no one magic bullet. However, at the top of the tree so far as all-round excellence is concerned are the following:
• Granite kitchen worktops (especially good for darker colours)
• Quartz kitchen worktops (especially good for lighter colours)
• Dekton kitchen worktops (especially good where scratch and stain resistance are paramount)
Owing to the origin and composition of these materials, they are available in a plethora of colourful shades and patterns. Of the three, Quartz worktops are excellent in strength, being perhaps the easiest to work with for installation purposes. Granite worktops have similar properties, but as natural products can bring their own challenges with batch variations and sometimes structural weaknesses.
Where to Start?
The first thing you need to decide on is the layout. To a great extent this will be decided by the shape of your room, but variations are possible, along the classic lines of:
• Single Wall
• Galley
• U Shaped
• L Shaped
• G Shaped
Recently, the use of full height cupboards at the wall and islands has led to simplified worktop formats and big islands, often with interesting shapes.
Style and Colour choice
The next question will be the units – contemporary or traditional? If traditional, in-frame or standard doors? The choice will be dictated both by your taste and budget.
Once the unit style is established, you will need to look at the colour. There is massive variety in kitchen unit colour and finish these days.
Kitchen Worktop Surfaces
The colour of your granite or quartz kitchen worktops has to work with your walls and cabinets. Home owners choose both highly contrasting shades, and closely matching worktops. In general, traditional kitchens are best topped with natural or natural-looking materials, while clearly man-made looking quartz worktops suit contemporary kitchens. But the choice is yours.
The ideal material for your new kitchen worktop should be durable – water and heat resistant, tough against breakage, scratching and chipping, and with good stain resistance. It should not be conducive to the growth of bacteria or fungi. It should also be low maintenance.
Many materials match some of these criteria, but there is no one magic bullet. However, at the top of the tree so far as all-round excellence is concerned are the following:
• Granite kitchen worktops (especially good for darker colours)
• Quartz kitchen worktops (especially good for lighter colours)
• Dekton kitchen worktops (especially good where scratch and stain resistance are paramount)
Owing to the origin and composition of these materials, they are available in a plethora of colourful shades and patterns. Of the three, Quartz worktops are excellent in strength, being perhaps the easiest to work with for installation purposes. Granite worktops have similar properties, but as natural products can bring their own challenges with batch variations and sometimes structural weaknesses.
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