Modern Kitchen Design Ideas and Tips
The modern kitchen usually consists of straight edges and clear lines. Different materials, lighting systems, and decorations can achieve further modern effects. This article will look at contemporary kitchen design ideas to help you plan your new kitchen.
Modern Kitchen Design: What Does it Involve?
The kitchen is one of the most critical places in the house or apartment and is the room that is used most often. Therefore, the furniture and appliances should be of good quality. While a bookshelf can be replaced quickly, it’s a different matter with a complete kitchenette. This article will show what a modern kitchen can look like, which materials are suitable, and how the lighting is optimally coordinated.
Life Hacks: Practical Gadgets in The Kitchen
The most essential thing in the modern kitchen is that everything is well stored and within easy reach. For this reason, people often think about how to implement modern kitchen design ideas that make their lives easier. For example, is your food stored in the cupboard within easy reach of the bench space?
Hack #1: Vacuum Pads for the Kitchen
The vacuum pads are a great idea. These can be easily applied to smooth surfaces, and all the necessary utensils find their place here:
Find the right shape.
Before planning the details, you should be clear about what shape you want to use in a modern kitchen. Of course, this primarily depends on the room. A narrow room will only accommodate one or two kitchenettes. Larger rooms have more leeway. The modern kitchen can be an L-shape that goes around the corner or into the room. An open kitchen offers even more options. A kitchenette? One with an L shape?
Additionally, a kitchen island? A seating option integrated into the work surface? The options available are as numerous as they are flexible.
What makes a modern kitchen?
The next step goes into more detail. What should the kitchen look like? Of course, the kitchen should not appear old-fashioned in modern houses and apartments. The good old country house kitchen with its flourishes, round shapes, and classic layout doesn’t fit in, even if there may be exciting combinations.
A clear line with straight edges and shapes characterizes a modern kitchen. The installed appliances, the materials of the fronts and work surfaces, the floor, the lighting, and, last but not least, the furnishings and decoration make a kitchen a modern kitchen.
The Kitchen Units
Modern kitchens can be made from a variety of materials. While there were only wooden kitchens for a long time, there are also veneered kitchen units in almost every color imaginable, whether bright red shiny fronts or a matt black face. Whatever is at all conceivable is also possible. Just be sure not to overdo it with the color so you don’t get tired after two years.
But that’s not all. You’re also seeing more and more stainless steel kitchens, which, despite the material, don’t immediately exude the flair of a large kitchen in a canteen or university cafeteria. More and more modern kitchens generally feature surfaces with a metal look. The metal X2, for example, gives fronts an unusual look. Its surfaces are slightly roughened and create an extraordinary atmosphere.
If you still find the different materials boring, you can combine them. Wood and metal? A white high-gloss front and dark sides? Nothing is impossible.
The Worktop
The materials for the worktop are no less diverse. Everything is possible, from veneered chipboard to natural wood worktops to metal worktops to a continuous stone surface. While natural wood looks bring a warm atmosphere to the modern kitchen and are never out, dark stone and shiny stainless steel immerse the kitchen in a progressive atmosphere that screams progress and modernity.
The Tile Backsplash
Even the modern kitchen can hardly do without a tile backsplash to not ruin the wall behind the work surface and stove. When cooking inevitably creates a mess. It sizzles. It splashes. Something is wrong. Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall.
The classic white tile backsplash doesn’t have to be a thing of the past; it can be reinterpreted with modern tiles. However, it can also look different: laminate and parquet can no longer be found on the kitchen floor or the wall. Or how about blackboard paint that can be written on with chalk? The wall there can be used as a calendar, meal plan, recipe overview, or similar.
The Floor – All Tile or What?
As with the tile backsplash, you no longer necessarily find tiles or a PVC floor with a hideous pattern, especially in modern kitchens. Dark tiles with light grouting go wonderfully with light kitchen furniture and create a great contrast.
What was once almost unthinkable can now be found in more modern kitchens: parquet or laminate. This creates a much friendlier and more homely atmosphere, especially in open kitchens that flow directly into the living room. An abrupt transition between different floor materials is avoided, and both rooms merge.
However, only suitable laminate resistant to moisture should be used in the kitchen to avoid floor swelling, as dripping water can never be avoided.
As an alternative, vinyl floors come in all visual variations conceivable, including wood and stone looks. Like PVC floors, they are particularly robust, easy to care for, and cheaper to purchase than laminate, parquet, or tiles.
Modern kitchen appliances
What use is a modern kitchen if the appliances are from the day before yesterday? Sure, all electrical appliances don’t have to be replaced when a new version is released that requires two watts less power, but you shouldn’t completely ignore energy efficiency.
Induction hobs and gas stoves are exceptionally energy efficient. While electric stoves are still widely used, whether with ceramic or ceramic hobs, they take what feels like an eternity to heat up to cooking temperature with gas or induction; this happens instantly. This saves energy and, therefore, costs less, even if the devices are often more expensive.
Old refrigerators and dishwashers should also be replaced with more energy-efficient, modern devices with efficiency class A+++ to remove unnecessary energy guzzlers from the house.
The Right Lighting
Nothing works in the modern kitchen without the right light. However, a distinction must be made between several forms of lighting because not everything makes sense. A single source of light that floods the entire room rarely helps because by the time you chop the ingredients, you’ll only have shadows on the work surface, and the knife will slash your finger.
So, the room light doesn’t have to be that bright. A few warm spotlights in the middle of the room or directly above the dining table are enough. Directly above the work surface, LED spots or LED strips provide light where it is needed. Indirect light sources provide unique accents, whether that’s a light strip under the worktop, floor spotlights on the wall, or LEDs mounted under a second hanging ceiling. The possibilities are immense, and each one creates a different atmosphere.
Vases and pots that reflect the transparent edges and direct shapes of the kitchen unit and provide space for colorful flowers or culinary herbs that can be used directly while cooking.
Furnishing And Decoration
You can also create a unique ambiance in the modern kitchen with decorations and other furnishings. Why not replace the round plates with the colorful figurines you’ve carried around since your student days with modern, square ones? And is Grandma’s tea service with the golden rim still up to date? Other shapes, colors, and, last but not least, other materials create variety. This continues with the decoration. Your photos or prints of famous works of art for the walls. Vases and pots that reflect the transparent edges and direct shapes of the kitchen unit and provide space for colorful flowers or culinary herbs that can be used directly while cooking.
Conclusion
A modern kitchen is not only characterized by clear and linear lines. The use of materials can also create a futuristic kitchen image. The icing on the cake is provided by sophisticated lighting and furnishings that reflect the basic shapes of the kitchen.
