Kitchen layouts for real working kitchens

Your kitchen floor plan grows out of your home, your life, your family, and the way you use your kitchen. It can be frustrating and difficult to come up with a good plan, let alone the best plan, but even if you later decide to use a KD (kitchen designer), time spent working on your own layout ideas and gathering information is never wasted. The more information you have, and the more you have thought about the possibilities and what you want, the better you’ll be able to work with a designer.

Kitchen layout basics

There’s more than one way to approach creating a floor plan for your new kitchen.

The classic “work triangle” method dates from the 1950’s and involves optimizing the triangle formed by the three main kitchen appliances - sink, range and refrigerator.

Since the 1950’s we’ve added many more possible appliances, and kitchens nowadays can have more than one of some types and more than one cook - so more recently the concept of “work centers” has come into use.

The classic work triangle

Placing your sink, range and refrigerator in a convenient arrangement that fits in your space will naturally result in a “work triangle”. Your job is to make that the best triangle possible. Here are some factors to consider:

The length of the three sides added together should be less than 26 feet, with each side being 4-9 feet. This will give you a work area which is not too cramped, but not so large that you waste time and energy hiking from one place to another.
Main traffic route should not pass through the triangle. Sometimes this is impossible to achieve, but redirecting traffic outside the triangle is much safer and more convenient for the cook.
An island or peninsula should not interrupt the triangle. A “barrier island” between major work areas or appliances causes a lot of extra walking (and maybe bumped hips as you swing past the corners of the island on the way to somewhere else).

Contemporary Planning: Work Centers or Zones

Nowadays the work triangle is not always enough to describe how a kitchen will function. Adding appliances (extra sink, dishwasher(s), separate cooktop and oven(s), microwave oven, etc.) adds extra work stations which the simple triangle can’t account for. Adding cooks to a single triangle is a recipe for tripping over each other.

The concept used to solve these problems in design is that of work centers or zones. A work center groups everything needed to do a specific type of task into a single area. The three major ones are:

Food Prep Center where food is prepared, often located by a prep sink or the main sink if there is only one
Cooking Center centered around the range or cooktop
Cleanup Center centered around the main sink

Depending on your cooking and eating style, you may have other work centers too:

Baking Center
Snack Center
Eating Center

and more. Visit the Work Centers article for more details on work center or work zone planning.

The Typical Kitchen Layouts

Kitchen floor plans are often classified by their shape. The simplest is a kitchen laid out along a single wall.

Two walls opposite each other give you a galley - a very efficient layout with the drawback that if there’s a door at each end, the traffic flow passes right through the work triangle.

L-shaped kitchens are laid out along two sides of a room: U-shaped kitchens use three sides. Both of these can be designed to be out of the main traffic flow, depending on door locations. Islands and peninsulas can be added to these basic shapes to direct traffic, improve work flow, and add counter and storage space.

Visit the individual pages for more details on these kitchen layouts: