Ways to integrate your kitchen
All too often, kitchen companies attract potential customers with beautiful pictures in glossy magazines or expensive showrooms. Having sold one of their designs to the customer, they will simply deliver and install the chosen cabinets and appliances in the space available in your house, tweaking bits here and there for it all to fit.
The potential problem with this method is that the kitchen then looks like it was “planted” there, with little or no regard to the house around it. In view of the growing popularity of all-in-one kitchen/family rooms, custom-made kitchens can be the solution. Here are some of the ways to integrate the kitchen into the house.
Use the full height of the room
Glass sided cabinets
Put light in cabinets
Match the house period’s style - match the mouldings; hand painting
Side of cabinet display shelves
Use the full height of the room
By extending the cabinets all the way to the ceiling, they seem to have grown out of the
walls and that they belong to the building. The key to this integration is the seamless connection to the ceiling, using the same mouldings as in the rest of the room.
Lighten up the cabinets with glass doors and lights inside. In the case of a high ceiling, the overall effect can be very dramatic. Understandably, the upper section of the cabinets might not be easily accessible, but that’s where one can display decorative or seldom used items. They will become a feature or a focal point in a lit-up glass cabinet (and gather less dust!)
Allow the light through
Kitchen cabinets can feel heavy, especially if they are wide and/or tall. It is important to lighten them up visually. One way to do this is by replacing the usually plain sides by glass. Day light will shine through and inside lighting will shine out at night. Lightening cabinets visually and literally can transform a kitchen appearance.
Design Match
Make sure your kitchen matches the style of the rest of the house. The cabinets’ and drawers’ door panels ideally should match the panels of other doors in the room/house in style and proportion; the panels’ and glass doors’ mouldings should be a copy of those on the windows; counter tops and cabinet colours should be chosen for a visual integration in the room; if any, the wood used needs to reflect the wood of other pieces of furniture in the room; cabinets need to be hand painted, just like the rest of the carpentry in the house – this will give an authentic period feel to the kitchen.
Personalise it to integrate it
The side of a fridge is not exactly the most attractive element in a décor. With some imagination, you can cleverly make it disappear. A mirror, a work of art, book shelves or, in this case (left), shelves to display a collection of demi-tasses. Suddenly, it does not look like the side of a fridge any more – the eye is drawn to something pleasant to look at.
