When planning and installing a kitchen for the small home, some questions to ask first are:
1. How important is the kitchen?
2. How frequently do you cook?
3. How many children do you have?
4. Is it the focus for family activities?
With this, you’d be able to shape and plan the kitchen into your lifestyle needs.
If the kitchen is rarely used, it need not be bigger than a cupboard. In fact, it could be in a cupboard and when the doors are closed, it’d be completely concealed. This way, the cupboard can stretch along the wall to give plenty of storage space while keeping the kitchen invisible when the doors are shut.
Alternatively, you can conceal a small cooking area in one corner of your living room behind a folding screen or angled sliding or folding doors. Or you can tuck it behind a ‘floating’ wall constructed across one end of the room. This is a solid wall which finishes short of the ceiling and walls of the room, creating a screen to which the kitchen work surface and equipment can be attached. One advantage is that when working in the kitchen you can hear and talk to other occupants while they cannot see you nor the clutter of preparing food. A similar screen which stops at shoulder height would give you some above-counter storage on a shallow shelf while not excluding you from the rest of the room’s activities.
Another suggestion is to dispense with the concept of a separate living room and make the kitchen the household’s living room. All you need is a small sofa and a table as big as the space allows. This makes sense if you have children as they usually gravitate to the kitchen and play there, even in a large house and even if there is another room officially designated as a playroom.
To increase the sense of space, replace the centre part of the cupboard doors with a screen of mesh wire or glass (translucent or otherwise). If not, use shutter doors or folding doors which does not take up as much space. Should this become a nuisance, remove the door altogether and stay with open shelves.
Another trick is to dispense with wall-mounted cupboards since they create a solid block at eye level which makes the room appear smaller. Instead, put up open shelves so that the back wall is in view. Use hooks and square storage jars and canisters to maximize the limited space effectively.
Lester Fong