Kitchen · utility room · island
A bespoke kitchen, set out around the way you cook
The only dimensions that are fixed are the appliances’. Within those, everything is yours: the layout, the drawers, the worktop and the light.
The kitchen is the room where use weighs heaviest. How much cooking is done, with how many people, how the shopping comes in and where the waste goes — that shapes the layout more than any stylistic choice. So we do not begin with the elevation. We begin with the plan.
Part of bespoke furniture.
N° 01
The only fixed dimensions
Fridges, combination ovens, steam ovens, hobs and extraction come in fixed sizes. Those cannot be altered; we work around them. Everything that follows — the height of a worktop, the width of a drawer, the position of a cabinet — is free.
A kitchen may be a simple pantry, or a layout with several ovens, a steam oven and appliances chosen with great care. Very little is cooked on gas any more, so that list is now almost always electric.
Which makes taking stock of the appliances the first real step, before a single line is drawn. That part of the budget is settled in any case: the appliances cost the same whichever route you take.
N° 02
Layout first, styling after
- Cooking and preparation belong together. Whoever is cooking needs working space beside the pan.
- The oven stays within reach. Not at the far end of the kitchen, however well that sits on the drawing.
- Wet beside wet. The dishwasher belongs near the tap, and the tap near the drain.
- The fridge has to be easy to reach. It is opened more often than anything else, and often with full hands.
- Stores apart, where possible. A utility room or a larder of its own keeps the kitchen itself clear.
- And then the waste. The question that returns in every kitchen: where it goes, separated or not. Rarely the first question, almost always the hardest.
Only once those planes are right does it become a matter of panels, edges and colour. Whether the kitchen turns out classical or severely plain changes nothing about that order.
N° 03
Then the details
From large to small. Anyone who cooks a great deal usually knows exactly how it should be organised: pans and china, the knives, the oils and the spices, the coffee and the tea, the machines. Our task is to get that logically into the cabinets — and to keep it buildable, because not every part needs inventing afresh.
Inner drawers or deep ones, open shelves or closed fronts: that choice follows from what has to go in, not the other way round.
Two examples from our own work. For a client who wanted a collection kept in view, we made open shelves adjustable in width — so the bay moves with whatever stands in it.
In another kitchen there is a very shallow drawer beneath the worktop for phones and keys, with a charging point inside. Everything goes into it on the way through the door. It also turned out to be where the iPads went, on the evenings when their parents decided enough was enough.
N° 04
The worktop
The worktop is the choice that weighs most, visually and practically. Ceramic, glass and stone at one end, marble where it may be more outspoken, and a simple laminate worktop for a pantry where little more than coffee is made at the other.
How heavily it is used decides what is sensible — and with it, where the budget goes.
N° 05
Light built into the kitchen
A bought kitchen comes without light. We draw it in: a line beneath the wall units, a strip within a shelf, concealed lighting behind glass in a display cabinet, spots or a line of light above the island.
Whether the extraction hangs above the island or disappears beneath the appliances as recirculation changes the whole upper plane as well — and with it, where the light comes from. We take those two decisions together, not one after the other.
N° 06
The utility room
Washing and drying
Washing machine and dryer, with room to hang something up, clean something off, or do the ironing.
Stores
Cupboards for what is used less often, including the occasional appliances that need not stand on the worktop.
Waste
Extra room for separated collection, out of the kitchen itself.
The door to outside
Where the utility room opens onto the garden or the garage, it also becomes the place for sports kit and everything that goes in and out.
N° 07
The island
An island is cooked at, often washed up at, and almost always sat at. That last is seldom incidental: people like to sit nearby while someone else cooks. Sometimes a couple of stools, sometimes a dining table fixed to the island as an extension of it.
Whether the hob goes into the island or stays against the wall depends on the room, and on how you prefer to stand while you cook.
A dressing room in mind as well? Read about walk-in wardrobes, or see the whole under bespoke furniture.
Introduction
Start with the measurements
Send us the floor plan, or let us come and look. With the measurements and a conversation about how you cook, we can draw a first layout — usually two or three, so that there is something to choose between.