Kitchen Planning: Thinking in 3 Dimensions
Your kitchen is unique among the rooms in your home in that it is a hub of activity for everyone in the household. It usually has more than one entrance, connects to other rooms and the outdoors and has areas designed for specific functions that are interrelated. You may rinse a pan at the sink, fill it with water and move it to a stove, add food prepped at another spot, cook at the stove and head back to the sink to drain off the hot water. The pan eventually gets washed and stored, often above your head or below your knees, requiring motion in those directions. All the while you may be conversing, coaching a child doing their homework nearby or watching the evening news on a convenient TV.
This range of motion makes designing a kitchen that works well a challenge. In this article we’re going to look at how you use your kitchen and how to start thinking in three dimensions and in terms of movement in, through and around your kitchen. This is the start of the actual design process and if you plan well now, you’ll end up with a far more functional kitchen.
Interior Design is Thinking In Three Dimensions
One of the hardest concepts to grasp about interior design is that it not a two dimensional process. We’re so used to seeing builders pouring over blueprints and floor plans that it is easy to start thinking exclusively in terms of two dimensional patterns. Architects, designers and builders may look at these flat drawings but they think of them in terms of a three dimensional space. The visual language of drafting and construction drawings made this visualization necessary. Now with easy access to 3-D CAD (Computer Aided Design) software for personal computers, it is possible to view your environment in three dimensions, freely apply and move various elements around and even ‘walk’ through the project, all before any actual construction take place.
The advantages of this technology, in the right designer’s hands, are enormous because it teaches the inexperienced person to think visually and to consider their kitchen as a room with three dimensions rather than a floor plan or elevation (an elevation is a two dimensional drawing equivalent to slicing down through a room from top to bottom, i.e. a wall of cabinetry viewed head-on.)
However most of this technology is not available to the average homeowner so we’re going to walk you through a process for evaluating the motion in your kitchen. Once you’ve considered how your kitchen needs to work, you can begin the process of physically designing your space. Even if you work with a designer, this exercise will give you insight into how the design process can enhance the final usefulness of the kitchen space.
Kitchen Traffic Flow
The primary motion in a kitchen is traffic flow. Unless you live alone, you’ll be sharing this room with others while doing complex and potentially dangerous tasks. Even if you do live by yourself, you will be working and living in the room on several levels from enjoying a quiet cup of coffee at a seating area to carrying in bags of groceries at the end of a busy day. If your kitchen only has one flat surface to leave a coffee cup or set down a heavy bag you’ll soon be stuck in your own personal traffic jam.
Traffic flow in a kitchen comes in three varieties: Movements of people working in the kitchen, movement through and around the work areas of the kitchen and movement between the kitchen and the outside or other areas of the house. Ideally these three ranges of motion do not conflict, realistically they will. When you start planning the layout of your kitchen start with an overall floor plan sketch of your entire house including outdoor areas. Don’t draw in any cabinets or appliances. Instead look at the way traffic flows in and out of the kitchen on a daily basis. Drawing in lines for the most heavily traveled routes into and through the kitchen will show you spaces and pathways that should not be obstructed. Think of this flow as being like water seeking the path of least resistance.
Isolation/Staging Areas
In addition to continuous movement through and around the kitchen there is movement into a specific areas for a specific reasons. A common example is coming in from the car with groceries. You walk in with your arms full and immediately seek a place to set things down. That spot will be near the door without obstructing the on-traffic flow you sketched in earlier. These ‘dead-end’ or staging area spots are isolation areas that are reserved for specific activities. You keep an area of counter free for incoming bags. You have a writing area with a phone for taking messages, checking recipes or paying bills. You keep a clear path from where you store your garbage to the outside area it is deposited in. This path should be clear of obstructions like open cabinet doors, chairs and tables.
These task specific isolation areas can come in other forms. An avid cook who entertains frequently and enjoys socializing while cooking may create a barrier of cabinetry like an island or peninsula to maintain separation between the cooking space and her guests. The same layout may serve to keep children out of a potentially dangerous situation during food preparation without banning them from the room.
