Planning Your New Bespoke Handmade Kitchen

Planning Your New Bespoke Handmade Kitchen

In our opinion, before you even look at any styles of kitchens, you need to seriously think about the layout that will work for you and your lifestyle.

Then no matter what colour or style you have it will be a great kitchen.

Many of us will have heard about “The golden Triangle”

The Golden Triangle

This is the theory that you should have your Sink, Cooker and Fridge within a few steps of each other, but obviously not so close as to make it uncomfortable to use.

The theory is great, but often we see the reality isn’t quite so easy and with the rooms we have sometimes compromises have to be made.

The great news about a bespoke handmade kitchen is that as the cabinets are made specifically for you, you aren’t tied to “off the shelf” sizes and can make it fit your space and really work for you. Utilising every drop of space.

Make a List

One of the first things to do is make a list.

What do you ideally want in your kitchen?

Think about items such as dishwashers, washing machines, fridges, freezers, ovens, hobs, wine coolers etc? Do you need them and do you have room for them?

Things to then consider are services, where is the gas, water and electricity, how easily could that be moved as sometimes the cost of moving a service can far outweigh the benefit.

The next step in planning a bespoke handmade kitchen would be to think about what layout options you have. Just keeping the current layout might be the easy choice and sometimes it isn’t the best option either.

Depending on your room size and shape, the layout of doors and windows this may leave you with a lot of options or very few.

Many people want to add a kitchen island to a space, but quite often English homes just aren’t big enough unless you are very lucky.

If you have an empty room, a good tip is to use masking tape to map out where the cabinets would be on the floor, this can really give you a sense of perspective and let you see how much room you really have taking into account walk ways etc.

Getting it on Paper

The next step is to get some ideas down, most people find a good old pen and paper the best way but doing a sketch and adding units can often help.

If you are more IT orientated there are several free kitchen planners you can use online, in the form of Apps and Websites.

But if you are like most of us you will leave it to the professionals.

Here at Classic Kitchens Direct we would ask you to take a photo or scan in any ideas you have and send them along with a few dimensions, we can then put it on our dedicated CAD systems and give you plans and 3D images of how your bespoke handmade kitchen may look.

This for most people really helps as you can visualise the whole thing and physically see your new kitchen. 

You may look at it and say “Yes” that’s exactly what I wanted, or vice versa. But that gives you the opportunity to start developing and moving it around to get it right for you.

Once you have refined your new bespoke handmade kitchen layout, it is then relatively easy to work out some costs of the cabinetry you need, along with the cost of worktops, appliances, fitting, flooring, etc.

Hopefully the costs are achievable and then it is down to the finer details such as door styles, colours etc, but the hard work at this point is over!

In our next blog we will be looking at what makes up the “cost” of a kitchen and ways of reducing a budget if it is too much.