Kitchens can be the trickiest room in your home to design, especially small ones. It can be hard to make space for everything you need, never mind finding places that are convenient. When diving into culinary design, consider your kitchen’s work centres and functionality. It might seem strange, but also think of a triangle.
The idea of the work triangle is not a new one. Designers began thinking about the most efficient way to work in a kitchen back in the early 1900s. Because of this, your kitchen is probably already set up in a work triangle, or if it is not it may be an easy fix. The idea of the work triangle is to make your kitchen layout as effective as possible, by placing the three areas you use most at different points of the small kitchen nook to form a triangle.
The three areas that are used or gone to most often are the small kitchen oven, the stove, and the refrigerator. It is best to keep the three ends of the triangle no further than 23 feet to 26 feet apart. If you have a small kitchen these areas may be closer. You want enough space between the points to make sufficient use of the different work centres, and allow an area of movement. This keeps the traffic of the room moving along and helps to not create a jam within the kitchen. See if your kitchen is conducive to this idea. If not, look into moving your sink to another counter or maybe your refrigerator to a different wall to make the most of your small kitchen layout.
Once you have an efficient work triangle set up in your small kitchen nook, you can focus on the work centres. These are the spaces in between each point on your work triangle. For instance, the space between the refrigerator and the sink is a great place to put items coming out of the refrigerator that need to be cleaned, or for all of the initial ingredients to reside. After taking the items out you can quickly move to the sink and wash anything that needs it before chopping, mixing, or preparing it for the next step in the meal.
The area between the sink and the stove can then be used to actually prepare the dish before it is placed in the oven or on the stove. Each of the centers promotes the natural movement between the points of the work triangle. After the dish is done it can be placed on the last open work center between the stove and the refrigerator.
To help make the most of the work triangle and work centers, you should also try to organize the items in your small kitchen layout around each of these spaces. If you know you will be chopping or mixing in a certain area then keep the correct utensils for that job within arm’s reach of the space.
With these simple changes and a little bit of small kitchen organization your small kitchen layout will be working for you, and not against you. Maybe you will even forget that you are in a small space and that you had a problem in the first place.
