Narrow Kitchen Design - Tips and Examples

If the family has a kitchen room that cannot be called close to a square, but it is easier to characterize it as long and stretched, then during repair it becomes necessary to develop such a narrow kitchen design so that the person in charge of cooking would be comfortable working there and gathering the rest. the pleasure of communication. When designing, you should take into account all the rules of ergonomics, provide for the location of the necessary household appliances, cabinets, work surfaces, and by means of design expand the space and make it harmonious.

Such a kitchen can be represented by two options: a narrow small room and an elongated, but significant in size. For each has its own secrets of design, selection of kitchen furniture, technical equipment.

Small narrow kitchen

Small-sized kitchen space is a legacy of post-war Soviet architecture, or a sign of modern urban planning, based on saving space in utility rooms, in order to allocate more square meters of living space.

Also, a narrow kitchen can be designed for a home where the family has breakfast, lunch and dinner in a separate dining room, and the kitchen is purely utilitarian in nature, used only for cooking (often not the hostess, but the hired staff).

Meeting planning options:

• A rectangle with a window and a door on the opposite end walls.
• A rectangle with a window and a door on the opposite elongated walls (large window, door in the center).
• A rectangular room with a window located in the upper part of the elongated wall (Baltic, Scandinavian house designs) and a kitchen door, shifted closer to one of the corners.
• A rectangle with a balcony at the end and a doorway on the adjacent wall.
• Very narrow room (1.5-1.8 m), endowed with a small window.
• The case without windows adjoining the dining room, separated by a door or decorated by an open aperture.

Options for the arrangement of furniture in different layouts

If the door is located opposite the window in the butt and the sufficient length of the kitchen room, the best way to design a narrow kitchen will be the transverse division of space into two zones - working and dining. The cooking zone project is a parallel variant of the placement of the kitchen unit. The passage left between the working lines should allow to move along the cooking process along the “refrigerator-sink-hob-tabletop” route and be sufficient to ensure free opening of the oven door, convenient use of floor cabinets and sliding drawers.

If the kitchen room is stretched wide, not long, the main wall is occupied by a window, and the door is in the middle of the opposite wall, then the area around the window should be given to the dining room group, and narrow ends should be occupied with working surfaces with appliances. One side holds the refrigerator and sink, connected by a worktop, the other - a stove with a surface for preparing food. This technique will allow you to adjust the elongation of the room, make the space close to the harmonious rectangle.

If the window opening cuts through the upper part of the wall (the third layout option), the space under it can be occupied by a working tabletop, cutting a sink, a hob into it, and a low fridge below it. The dining area should be given a blind corner, providing good local lighting, and hang kitchen cabinets of a small depth up to the ceiling on the wall opposite the window, arranging a large space for storing kitchen utensils.

When designing a narrow kitchen, pay special attention to the handles of kitchen cabinets. Far protruding parts, staples with sharp corners can be traumatic. It is better to use rounded elements or click-click technology (a simple way to open the door).

Inconvenient layout - the ability to apply fantasy

The last three of the above layouts can be described as "minimum kitchens in size". They are less common, and it is more difficult to equip them so as to ensure ease of use.

The kitchen, which has a balcony, practically does not leave the possibility to place full-fledged dining and work areas. However, having built a surface along a long wall and having placed it under a window (having united with a window sill), you will get enough space for your culinary experiments.

Directly near the entrance door is better to use floor cabinets of reduced depth for easy movement around the kitchen. The dining table of this variant can be rolled out perpendicularly from under the tabletop, it is possible to provide a lifting panel that covers the lower kitchen unit, or to mount a folding wall table on the opposite wall. The mobile dining group will be complemented by comfortable folding chairs.

During the cooking process (moving along the table top), the chairs are folded and hung on decorative wall hooks to eliminate possible inconveniences, or move inside a special niche under the working surface.

A very narrow kitchen space (less than 2 m wide) implies a single-line placement of a kitchen unit, folding dining furniture. To reduce the width of the tabletop, you should use mini-format household appliances, kitchen modules of reduced dimensions.

The kitchen case assumes only working process of preparation of food. With its arrangement proposed:

• U-shaped arrangement of furniture set or G-option;
• the small width of the “case” dictates the use of lockers of reduced depth along the longitudinal walls;
• full-size household appliances fills the end of the kitchen or goes along one of the walls (an L-shaped way of arranging furniture is preferable).

Large elongated kitchen

A similar room of a large area is found in country houses, where the kitchen and dining area emit a part comparable to the scale of the living room.

Techniques for designing a narrow volumetric kitchen suggest:

• The division of the premises into a cooking zone (U-shaped with an open space inside for freedom of movement) and a dining area (with sliding windows into the floor, facing the garden, or framing a beautiful view).
• The device along the walls of two parallel lines - one (deaf) to accommodate a kitchen set and necessary equipment, the second (with windows along the entire wall) for installation below the window of a long table for snacking (the option implies a separate dining room).
• The device is perpendicular to the long wall between the windows of the kitchen peninsula of large width, outstanding inside the room. Furniture, household appliances are located in the form of an unfinished letter "P" on the free walls. The remaining square of the square is used as a breakfast area or a resting place (it is possible to place a stand-alone table with chairs, or a set with sofa benches).

Design narrow space: the choice of colors, textures, decor

When choosing a color solution for a small space elongated in length, one should adhere to the axiom "white - expands, dark - reduces." The monochrome of the kitchen does not make it boring, you can add moods by including several bright accents, the main thing is to follow the measure and the rule of conciseness: "If you can do without something, it is better to do without it."

The interior of a narrow kitchen should be thoughtful, combining only the most necessary, excluding the fragmentation of space by small elements. Filling the shelves of the headset with collections of miniature objects of various colors, the use of alternating colorful decor spots, bright geometric ornaments will be inappropriate, the room will become even more compressed. If the walls provide for the installation of open shelves, then there is better to put a single-color sets of tableware or serving glass of a uniform shape.

Good lighting will make the kitchen bigger

Small narrow kitchens, besides the limited useful area, usually have another serious drawback - low natural light, especially if the window is at the end of the room. In this case, when designing the design of a narrow kitchen, it is necessary to carefully work out the placement of lighting devices, to pay great attention to good illumination of the working area. A sufficient amount of light is a visual expansion of the volume of the room, the convenience of the hostess, a guaranteed absence of minor domestic injuries.

The general lighting plan includes:

• illumination of the working area;
• internal illumination of the space of the upper kitchen cabinets;
• general overhead lighting;
• local illumination of the dining area (ceiling lamp or wall wall sconce falling over the table).

The last point is very important - good lighting of the table, where the family dinner is held, gives the homely atmosphere a bit of bright sun, fills it with warmth and coziness. In addition, psychologists say - well-lit food looks more attractive, awakens the appetite, better disappears from the plates.

When decorating a limited room or choosing lamps, you should not get carried away with defiant details, it is better to choose a design of a calm style.

Several transparent pendant lamps, as an option for overhead lighting, will perfectly fulfill the necessary function, give a modern accent to the interior of a narrow kitchen, but will not load a small space. Particularly interesting on the general background can look large-sized "bulbs Ilyich" or techno-lamps.