Kitchen Cabinets that have the wow factor
The kitchen is the heart of many homes. It’s the centre of activity, the hub around which everything revolves.
And in many period homes, the kitchen was an afterthought. Historically, right up until the 1930’s the kitchen was just a space in which the cook did whatever they did. It was below-stairs, lower-class, servant territory and like all servant spaces, it was small, dark and inconvenient. Of course, staying true to your Victorian or Edwardian home is one way to proceed. You can use Kitchen Warehouse LTD‘s range of simple kitchen units in pastel colours and maybe a dresser to give an antique appeal to your kitchen. That’s real period charm.
But maybe you want to give your kitchen some wow factor? It’s definitely worth doing for the economic value – a good kitchen helps houses sell quicker and at a higher value. And it’s going to be great for you – a stunning kitchen gives you pleasure every time you walk into it. Here are three ways to make a statement kitchen stand out in an older property and one way to work the magic in reverse; creating a stylish period kitchen in a modern home.
Open Your Period Kitchen to the Max
Period houses are gorgeous – stylish and full of history and charm. All the more reason to consider very carefully before rejecting the kitchen style that fits with your period home. But … and it’s a big but, if you can pull off the dramatic contrast between a period home and a kitchen with individual style, it will change the whole house, creating a central star feature that adds wow to the whole property.
Consider using light enhancing paint, up-lighters and downlighters, ceramic hobs and high gloss acrylic kitchen units in Gold which have light-reflecting particles. This all brings light to the kitchen, giving it a sunnier, larger feel. Combine your gleaming kitchen cabinets with transparent details like glass pans and glowing ceramic hobs. It all adds up to a kitchen that’s like the TARDIS – bigger on the inside! This is also a way to help dull kitchens feel light and airy.
Ultra-Modern Kitchen in Period Home
Utilising a modern kitchen with traditional features
Your dream home contains a Cinderella kitchen: cramped, dark and a bit sad. How do you make it the belle of the ball? Don’t try to stick with the traditional kitchen that your house would have contained. Instead, take a look at the gorgeous possibilities of ultra-modern kitchens.
Modern kitchens contain many features that harmonise beautifully older properties. In a cramped or oddly shaped space, handleless kitchen doors give seamless, soundless work areas. This makes your kitchen feel designed for living – it’s not just a place to cook food, it’s a carefully thought out room. Coloured kitchen units can ramp up the va va voom of modern kitchen cabinets too; magenta or blue give instant sex appeal to a kitchen, and you can use modern colours to enhance the whole house, taking little details through every room, magenta or blue cushions in the living room, magenta or blue towels in the bathroom. It’s really easy to pull your colour scheme together and give your entire house a focus and it’s fun too!
This style of kitchen design actually adds power to the period details of your home like old floorboards or ornate fireplaces. Stylish modernity, based on sophisticated kitchen cabinets, offers a beautiful contrast to the rest of your home, making its features even more outstanding.
Working with Traditional Features
Some of the features of your period kitchen might be too good to lose, or too complicated to remove. An eclectic kitchen design can build a traditional feature such as sash windows right into the modern design of your kitchen, highlighting the unusual and elegant and bringing it into harmony with contemporary kitchen cabinets and design. Instead of having a feature that stands out, seeming to be an afterthought or an awkward problem to work around, good kitchen design can make your period item outstanding, showcasing its distinctiveness and give your kitchen personality. So why not explore if an apparently old-fashioned element already in your kitchen could become a focal point, creating a marriage of stylish modernity and historical value?
Period Kitchen – Modern Home
So you’ve moved into a brutalist flat, an eco-designed apartment or a 1960s box of a bungalow and you have an anonymously boring kitchen? No problem. Reverse the trend. Pick the kitchen style you’ve always wanted and invest in it, big time. Shaker replacement kitchen unit doors can add the perfect historical ambience without sacrificing the clean feel of your modern home.
You don’t have to stop there. Period details can make the most boring kitchen into a haven of comfort and serenity. Chintz, old china and other shabby chic details will fit perfectly with ivory painted oak kitchen doors or standard shaker cabinets. Nothing will look too old-fashioned by the charm of a period kitchen can be yours in even the most modern home.
Another feature that enhances the sense of a historical kitchen in a modern space is fire: whether you opt for a built-in range, a kitchen fireplace or a wood burning stove, the fire element always harks back to the origins of cooking and can be a subtle, charming addition to your kitchen. Modern kitchen cabinets are highly accommodating of such details and work well alongside the more traditional features such as a display of copper pans above an ultra-modern gas hob.
Making a Kitchen Wow not Whoa
What all these kitchens require is planning. Good design and excellent attention to detail knit the whole process together, making your kitchen into the planned, perfect space you envisaged. Haphazard units, thrown together without much forethought, can leave it looking as if you bought a cheap kitchen from a builders merchants and had it installed by an apprentice who’d never cooked anything other than Pot Noodles!
Great kitchen units are like the fantastic bone structure of a fashion model – it doesn’t matter what you put around them, everything looks great! Choosing the best kitchen for a period home involves finding something that you will be delighted to look at for years to come, and that means spending a little time and forethought on exploring exactly what the kitchen means to you.
We all want rooms we enjoy spending time in, so why not entrust your kitchen to a company that has a track record of supplying excellent quality kitchen cabinets at a great price? Then you can trust your own taste to do the rest, giving your family a kitchen to love. And you can be confident your kitchen will make every viewer say ‘Wow!’
