Kitchens are known as the heart of the home, and for this reason they require proper upkeep. Thanks to their design needing to be just right for those cooking and spending time in the kitchen, they can also afford to be a little bit more indulgent in terms of design. Where else would you fix a spice rack to the wall, or fit appliance after appliance together in line with the cabinet designs?
By Team Savant
Image: Jean-Philippe Delberghe
Yet it can sometimes be that without the proper care, kitchen design can look tacky and overdone. This can lead to a space feeling cluttered and overbearing, to the point where renovation might be needed to help rectify the issue outside of a simple cleanup. Additionally, disrepair in some areas compared to thorough polish others can make a kitchen feel incomplete as if you’ve only cared to install and rectify the implements you’re going to use most. Below, then, we’ll discuss how to avoid tackiness in that design, looking to curate a more worthwhile result from now into the future.
Keep The Finish Consistent
It’s important to make sure the overall finish of a kitchen is well-applied. Too many disparate styles can make the space seem inconsistent, adding to the visual clutter of such a space. Not only that, but it might be that finishes that seem incompatible can actually ruin how expensive they were, as the effect might be limited.
For instance, if you’re opting for a beautifully rustic environment with certain trimmings such as marble countertops, then you might find that modernist cabinet finishes could come across as incompatible.
Depending on your aims for the visual style, then discrepancies could be a drag or a slight benefit. At the very least, it’s important to consider which fixtures would actually have the most pressing visual impact in such a space, and do your best to work with that. Learning about how to manage kitchen doors https://www.larkandlarks.co.uk/kitchen-doors could help you feel empowered in making those design decisions.
Use Appropriate Lighting
As the kitchen is a fundamentally utilitarian space, and perhaps has the most ‘danger risk’ of any other room in the house outside of a garage or wherever you store your DIY tools, it’s important for the space to be properly lit.
However, some people can go overboard with this, using fluorescent lights that tend to be overbearing and can provide too much illumination which is harsh on the eyes. That’s why it’s a great idea to use ceiling lights or appropriately hanging light fittings to make sure this light is spread carefully across the whole space.
Fully White Appliances
Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with using appliances that are all white, but having a totally neutral and cleansed visual style in a kitchen can look quite dated. Not to mention that all-white appliances tend to stain easily and require much more in the way of cleaning.
This is why more and more modern home kitchen furnishings use darker, slate colors to provide some visual texture but also to help the space feel calmer and cleaner. This all depends on your preference and where you live, so take this as warm guidance rather than a hard and fast rule.
Tiled Countertops
While this may have been all the range in the mid-80s and 90s, tiled countertops certainly show their age, while the grout between them can also become dirtier than a simple flat countertop.
Tiles are perfectly fine to place around the sidewalls of your kitchen of course, as they’re easy to wipe down and can act as a natural buffer between whatever you’re cooking and the wall paint. On the countertop though, they don’t look so good.
Distressed Cabinets
These can actually look very nice in a home arranged to make use of them, but again, it’s important to make sure the overall theming of your kitchen design is in support of this, providing that thematic visual context your kitchen needs to thrive, instead of seeming somewhat misdirected.
With kitchen designs, it’s mostly always important to stay simple, and to focus on one visual purpose instead of trying to do everything at once. If you can do that, then almost all visual styles can look worthwhile instead of segmented and overbearing.
With this advice, you’ll be sure to avoid tackiness in kitchen design, while implementing fixtures, features and motifs that work for the space through and through. You’ll be sure to enjoy spending time in this space thanks to your efforts.