Designing A Kitchen For Entertaining

If you love entertaining guests in your home, there are lots of things you’ll need to consider when designing your new kitchen. As well as feeling welcome, you’ll want your guests to be in awe of your space. Similarly, you too should feel relaxed knowing that you have a flawlessly designed space for hosting and preparing food & drinks.

Whether it’s late-night dinner parties or afternoon tea with friends, we’ve put together this short guide to help you with some of the more important considerations when creating a space that’s perfect for entertaining…

The Layout

The most important practical consideration when designing a kitchen for entertaining is the layout. The layout of your space will impact the natural workflow and how you move through your kitchen. The location of the fridge, the oven and the sink should all be at the forefront of your mind when planning your space to ensure hosting is a stress-free & enjoyable experience.

Whether you prefer casual or more formal entertaining should also influence the design. Kitchen islands have a huge range of benefits and provide the perfect setting for more informal dinners & get-togethers. An island will also provide your space with additional storage options which will help to ensure your room feels more spacious and less cluttered. An island also helps to zone your room, creating a boundary between your cooking space and guests. Placing seating around your island makes for a natural social hub for guests to gather while positioning your hob here allows you to socialise as you prepare food.

Bar stools can work well around a kitchen island or peninsula. If you do intend to frequently dine at your island, your seating must be comfortable. Stools with armrests and cushioning are a more sensible choice if you’re expecting to spend entire afternoons or evenings socialising around your island.

Materials & Finishes

Once you have decided on the layout of your space, you can consider the more intricate details of your design.

When it comes to worktops, you’ll want to consider a surface which looks great but which also considers the practical demands which come with entertaining. Granite is a great choice of worktop that meets both of these criteria. It’s incredibly stylish and will bring a luxurious look and feel to your kitchen. As a material, it’s also extremely hard-wearing & heat resistant whilst also being exceptionally easy to clean. Although hard wood kitchen worktops can look incredible, particularly in more traditional spaces, they’re typically more difficult to clean and can be prone to scratches & damage.

And then there are your colour choices. Increasingly popular in 2020, darker colours – like navy and darker shades of green – combine fantastically well with dramatic ambient lighting, exuding modern sophistication. Brass finishes are a perfect complement to on-trend green and blue colour schemes and create a high-end and stylish look.

Lighting

Lighting is an element of design that sometimes gets overlooked. Your lighting choices, however, play a critical role in determining the atmosphere and ambiance throughout your space. You’ll also want to ensure that your lighting not only achieves the right aesthetic but that it also meets all the necessary criteria from a practical point of view.

Warm ambient lighting sets a sophisticated mood for an evening gathering and will provide soft light throughout your kitchen. Add an extra dimension to your room by including accent strip lights. Strip lights can be integrated into display cupboards or situated above and below the kitchen units to create a subtle highlight with an ultra-modern, contemporary feel.

Installing full-length bi-fold doors will help to flood your kitchen with natural light in the daytime and will create a more seamless connection between your kitchen and the outdoors.

Appliances

No kitchen is complete without the right appliances. If you’re serious about entertaining and want your guests to be impressed time and time again, you’ll want to give considerable thought & make the right choices when it comes to your appliances.

There’s a huge range of new, innovative technologies & appliances to choose from in 2020. For a passionate chef, a warming draw can be a practical addition and will help ensure you don’t waste precious oven space warming plates.

A real must for the more serious cook is the Bora induction hob. A self-contained hob and extraction system, it’s ideal for positioning on a kitchen island. Working through electromagnetic heat transfer, the hob will sense your pans meaning you can place them anywhere on the stove, not restricting you to traditional five rings. This design feature gives an extraordinarily sleek and stylish aesthetic as well as delivering industry-leading functionality. The induction technology is also an incredible safety feature as the electromagnetic waves prevent the hob from being left hot.

Another must-have appliance at the moment is the Quooker tap. It not only instantly provides water at 100 degrees Celsius, it runs chilled & filtered still or sparkling water too. An enviable feature in any kitchen.

Including a wine cooler in your new kitchen is a fail-safe way to impress guests at those late-night dinner parties. A wine cooler is a luxurious addition to your space which comes with a range of practical benefits when entertaining.

At Kreativ kitchens we partner with several leading suppliers enabling us to advise on the exact appliances to make your kitchen function seamlessly. If you’d like to find out more about anything you’ve read, or if you’d like to speak to one of our expert designers about your own bespoke kitchen project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can contact us now by clicking here or by calling our showroom on 0113 436 0630