Once designed merely to cook a meal and the family to sit around a metal table for six, today’s kitchens are designed for function plus beauty. Beauty has become paramount, along with containing efficient products that are designed to look spectacular, when you enter the kitchen. Thus there are many focal points as you look around the room and even hidden areas like the refrigerator or garbage disposal behind beautiful wood doors. A kitchen is now a place used for our comfort zone but with style and a nurturing effect for our spirit. Without a doubt today our kitchen is the real family room, the heart and soul of the home. What ever your taste sophisticated to simple or the new European “unfitted” look in traditional woods or the super high-tech look there are several styles and finishes to make everyone happy. There is high-gloss lacquer cabinets, faux painted cabinets or expensive cherry cabinets and more choices then one can imagine. That is why it is good to use a professional interior designer to help with the schematics or layout. The emphasis on quality and luxury finishes remains foremost in the clients mind, whatever the size of the room. Do you as a family snuggle deeper into your home or nest, as a homeowner the family is beginning to do more at home bringing back the feeling that we had with our grandparents. But, the one change is the evolution of luxurious products. As a homeowner you can build a kitchen that looks generations old but that are more appealing by the wood and finishes you chose. Designers can create distinctive environments. Character-lending ledges and shelves hold ceramic canisters, bottle collections, cookbooks, or ultra-chic frosted stemware. Appliance garages will hide your microwave, toaster, coffeepot and blender. Homeowners continue to plan for an island in their kitchen plan; this could be for a cooking zone or a vegetable sink. Today’s island helps define the work areas, directs people in the right directions, and offers the perfect setting for socializing. Islands linking the kitchen to the breakfast or family room can be built with two or three levels for simultaneous use by the cook, a child busy doing homework, and a friend stopping in for a chat and a snack. This will all depend on the size of the kitchen my preference is a larger island if possible the use of the whole granite slab which would be 48” by 105” after install and bull-nose around all four sides. An extra microwave oven or small-refrigerated space or wine cooler is often installed in the base of the island for ultimate convenience, especially when you will use this beautiful space for entertaining. Let me add the term the “work triangle”, with the refrigerator, sink and stove forming the points of an unobstructed traffic pattern, this is an automatic rule of thumb. Now the European concept of zones allows much more individualized, floor plans. Take a look at an Italian built kitchen and you would be surprised how they hide every item behind fake walls and the islands have areas that would surely fool Americans to the hidden appliances that stem out of the most unusual places.

BY DEBORAH OF DEH INTERIORS