When you are embarking on a kitchen design layout for easy cooking there are a few important things to consider. The first being appliance placement. Most designers will tell you that you want to achieve a cooking triangle. With the stove, sink and refrigerator being placed to form a triangle in your kitchen. In fact they will go as far to say that if you achieve that you will cut down on your cooking time drastically. By placing your appliances in strategic locations it will reduce the amount of time you spend walking back and forth between major appliances and allow you to have the most important things at your finger tips at all times. Placing your appliances in a triangle pattern can be done in even small kitchen layouts.

The second thing to consider when redesigning your kitchen for the ease of cooking is who will will be in the kitchen with you. If you are one that often cooks with children, friends or family close by then you will want to ensure that you design your kitchen in a manner that allows them to be around as you cook. Kitchen island designs can be very good for this – have an island with your stove or sink built into it. If you like to entertain as you cook it may be better suited to have your stove on the island as you will be able to talk and visit as you cook. In addition to considering placing the stove and or sink on the island you will want to have an area opposite you that is suitable for friends and family sitting at bar stools. Consider a large enough island to accommodate at least three people to sit at. This would allow your children to have breakfast at the island and to visit when company is present.

Third in your kitchen design layout would be to consider your cabinet placement and size. Many homes are going toward taller cabinets with pull out shelves and even deep drawers to hold pots and pans instead of placing them in cabinets. Remember when you are designing your cabinets to consider how you will be using them and to for example take into consideration that if you use a lot of spices you will need a spice drawer or cabinet designed especially for spices.

Not only can your new kitchen be a functional kitchen, one in which that you are allowed to cook, entertain and do so with ease, it can also be a work of art. With the new finishes provided to select from there is no reason that you should not be allowed to express yourself with your selections. Today’s most popular counter top is granite, granite is a hard surface that is designed to last a lifetime. It also comes in so many different color choices and grades that you should be able to find something to suit your needs with ease.

How to Customize Your Island

You can use any arrangement of wall and/or base cabinets which fits your space, to form the base of your kitchen island. Then you can customize it in many ways to create many different potential kitchen island designs:

Shape

• Change levels on part of the island, up to bar height or down to table height
• Make the island an unusual shape. Who says everything has to be rectangular? Try angles and curves: mock up the shape with cardboard and tape to see how it looks and how it works.
• Use several small movable islands pushed together to make one big island, or split them up and move them to where they are needed
• Match the island counter shape with a shape in the ceiling above – a dropped or raised section, an outline, curved track lights, a pot rack or vent hood.

Base

• Don’t use cabinet doors at all – have an “all-drawers” island
• Add feet to the bottom of your base cabinets in the toe-kick area
• Add legs to the ends, or to support an eating overhang. Check antique tables for proportions and sizes: some island legs I’ve seen in magazines are way oversized and clunky-looking to my eye.
• Use small gaps between your base cabinets for cookbook shelves, bottle storage, display niches, cutting board or baking sheet storage, pull-out towel storage, narrow pullout racks for spices, etc.
• Do without a toe-kick and have legs or a pedestal instead, especially in historic houses where this would have been done in the original period. Try the pedestal idea before you do it, to make sure you can still work at the counter without banging your toes.
• If one side of your island faces the living or family room, and that side is not an eating counter, display cabinets with glass doors look wonderful lit from inside. Safety glass and a solid bottom part to the doors reduce the risk of accidents.
• Build your island in an identifiable style that contrasts with the rest of the kitchen: Craftsman, Victorian, Modern, Art Deco or Southwestern can all make an interesting change

Countertop

• Use a countertop material different from that used on your counters round the edge of the room
• Order a special edge treatment: no matter what countertop material you use, the edges can be customized
• Use a custom-shaped countertop which overhangs the cabinets
• Combine more than one countertop material: perhaps a butcher-block prep area with a marble slab for pastry
• Include flip-up or pull-out worktop sections to extend your counter space

Materials

• Change cabinet finishes on the island: dark vs light cabinets, painted vs stained, antique-look vs modern
• Use two-tone finishes on the island cabinets: light and dark wood panels, distressed or antiqued paint finishes
• Customize the non-door ends and sides of your island: panel with decorative materials like beadboard or tile, panels or doors to match your cabinets, even wallpaper or fabric (varnished for protection). You could also use a translucent material and light it from the inside.

Details

• Use different hardware on the island, different in style, material or both
• Add rails, racks, pegs, hooks, holders etc wherever they’ll be useful
• ‘Dock’ a movable island or cart in or under a larger fixed island for flexibility
• Light your island with multiple decorative pendant lights: mini-chandeliers, art glass shades, industrial lighting, whatever fits your style. Dimmable, of course!
• Use corbels or brackets to support overhangs as well as or instead of legs. These could match corbels used elsewhere in the kitchen, perhaps supporting a hood over the range.

Appliances and Fixtures

• Add appliance drawers: fridge, freezer, dishwasher, or warmer.
• Include an interesting sink which would be impractical as your main sink: an odd shape like a trough or unusual material like copper
• An unusual or specialized faucet makes a great island feature too
• Instead of a standard cooktop in the island, use separate burners arranged in a row, or a mix of different fuel types, a grill, or induction units.

Potential Island Problems to Avoid

• Squeezing an island into a space which isn’t large enough
• creating a “barrier island” which interrupts the legs of the work triangle
• expensive plumbing work to have a sink in your island
• expensive ventilation work to have a cooktop in your island
• no visual break to hide sink- or range-side mess on the island
• too-short overhangs intended for eating, resulting in bumped knees
• cramped and too-narrow aisles round the island
• appliance doors which open into people sitting at the island
• pointy corners and edges on island worktops (ouch!)
• appliance doors on the island and perimeter directly across from each other, which interfere
• Lights not centered over the island when they should be
• Safety issues with cooktop too close to diners
• Electrical outlets in island cabinets interfere with interior fittings like pullouts or drawer slides
• Island legs which interfere with diners legs
• Making the island too narrow or too small altogether

Kitchen floor plans can benefit greatly from a custom kitchen island, but only if you can avoid the potential gotchas!

One of the best locations for an island is between the kitchen area and the living or family area of a large all-purpose room. There is usually enough space in a room like this to make an island workable, and the island can mark off the boundaries of the kitchen area and provide seating space without creating tight squeezes in the process.

Things to watch out for in your kitchen island designs:

• creating a “barrier island” which interrupts the legs of the work triangle
• expensive plumbing work to have a sink in your island
• expensive ventilation work to have a cooktop in your island
• visual breaks to hide sink- or range-side mess on the island
• too-short overhangs intended for eating, resulting in bumped knees
• cramped aisles round the island
• appliance doors which open into people sitting at the island
• pointy corners and edges on island worktops (ouch!)

The main advantages of L-shaped kitchen floor plans are that it’s easy to keep traffic out of the work triangle, they can be compact, and the area opposite the corner of the L can be the perfect place for a table and chairs or an island.

If the L gets too big, though, it can mean a lot of walking. You also have the “corner problem”: whether to put the sink or range there (which restricts usage to one person at a time) or a cabinet which either has dead space inside or requires special fittings to use the space.

Islands are very popular features in kitchen layouts – but an island is not automatically a useful feature, or a good use of space, in every kitchen.

There are several things to consider when you start working on kitchen island designs.

Do you have the space?

First, and most important, do you have space for a kitchen island at all? You need aisle space on both sides of the island. The recommended aisle width is 48″, although 42″ will do and 36″ is a tight-squeeze minimum where there is no through traffic. For the island itself, a minimum useful width is 2 feet and most people would want their island wider than this.

Here are some example kitchen island designs showing the amount of space taken up by an island in various situations.

Kitchen with Central Island

Using the minimum island width of 2ft, 42″ aisles, and 2ft deep cabinets and countertops round the edges of the room, you would need a room 13 feet wide to fit an island into the middle.

L-shaped Kitchen with Island

For an L-shaped kitchen with a 5′ x 3′ island tucked into the L and 4 foot aisles, you’d need a space 9 feet by 11 feet.

Single Line Kitchen with Separator Island

If you want to use a 3′ 8″ x 7″ island opposite a single line counter, to separate a kitchen in a larger room like a great room from the rest of the room, for a four foot aisle allow a space 9′8″ deep by the length of the main counter.

If your kitchen is simply too small to allow a built-in island, like my own 8ft wide galley kitchen, you can use a kitchen island cart instead. With a cart, you can roll it out into place when you need it, and tuck it away when you don’t.

What Will Your Kitchen Island Designs Include?

You can have an island which is simply all countertop, or you can include appliances, a sink, an eating area, etc.

Island Cooktops

The two main issues to consider for a cooktop in an island are venting and safety.

Venting: obviously, with an island cooktop you can’t have a ventilation hood above it on the wall because there is no wall! You have three choices – a vent hood suspended from the ceiling above the cooktop, a pop-up vent, or a downdraft vent.

Safety: an island cooktop is accessible from more than just the front, which makes it easier for children and even adults to accidentally contact a hot burner. A narrow island where the rear of the cooktop is right at the back edge of the island is particularly bad for this. It can also be a problem when you have an eating area at counter height at the back of the range. A solution to this problem is to have a two level island where the eating area is above the range, or there is simply a raised ledge at the back of the island protecting the range (and perhaps also acting as a leaning or serving shelf).

Island Sinks

Sinks don’t pose the safety issues of cooktops, nor do they need venting in the same way. They do need their own special plumbing vent arrangements though, which can be quite awkward. Depending on the specific arrangement of your kitchen, water feed lines and drainage lines might also be more or less difficult to arrange.

Many people also dislike the idea of “sink mess” being on view as much as it can be with an island sink. This mostly applies to main cleanup sinks where dirty dishes are stacked before being washed – small prep sinks don’t seem to create as much mess. A raised area, eating counter or ledge at the back of the island can hide the sink mess from view, and provide a useful location for electrical outlets, without cutting off the views in and out of the kitchen.

Eating Areas in Islands

The most common kind of eating area combined with an island is an overhanging counter-height area at one side or end, or possibly both. This is used with stools or counter-height chairs. However, you can also have more than one level on your island, raising your eating area to bar height, 42″, or lowering it to table height, 30″. The overhang needed for an eating area depends on the height: table height needs 18″, counter height needs 15″, and bar height needs 12″. In general, allow 24″ of width for each place setting if you don’t want adults bumping elbows.

Watch out for the clearance needed behind your chairs or stools. If there’s no traffic passing by behind, you need 32″ from the edge of the table or counter to the wall. If there will be people passing behind your seated diners, 36″ will let them edge past, but you’d be better with 44″ so that they can walk past. If there are appliances on the wall behind the chairs or stools, you need even more space to allow for appliance doors to open.

How Will Your Island Relate to Nearby Work Zones?

Your new island needs to be designed in relation to other work zones in the kitchen near it. It might indeed form part of nearby work zones. For example, a refrigerator needs a landing zone close by to put things down as you take them out of or put them into the fridge. An island across from a fridge can serve as the landing zone. This is works especially well with side-by-side or french door fridges, where both sides of the fridge are “hinge sides” so you can’t put a landing zone beside the fridge on the side away from the hinge.

Similarly, if you have a prep sink in the island it should relate to your food storage area and your cooking area.

If possible, in cases like this, the aisle you cross from landing zone to fridge, or prep sink to cooktop, should not be a through traffic path.

Custom Kitchen Islands

Unless you’re using a movable island like a kitchen island cart that you can buy off the shelf, just about every island is custom in the sense that it is unlike any other, and is made to fit your space and needs. Custom kitchen islands cover a range from the completely custom-made and custom-finished island to match your custom cabinets, to a much more economical island made out of standard size cabinets and countertops assembled in creative ways.

Custom Touches for Your Island

Given some arrangement of cabinets (wall and/or base) which form the base of your island, you can customize it in many ways.

• Change levels up to bar height or down to table height
• Combine more than one countertop material: perhaps a butcherblock prep area with a marble slab for pastry
• use a custom-shaped countertop which overhangs the cabinets
• Panel the non-door ends and sides of your island with decorative materials like beadboard, tile, end panels from your cabinet range, even wallpaper or fabric (varnished for protection)
• Add legs to the ends, or to support an eating overhang. Check old farm tables for proportions and sizes: some island legs I’ve seen in magazines are way oversized and clunky-looking to my eye.
• Use corbels to support overhangs as well as or instead of legs. These could match corbels used elsewhere in the kitchen, perhaps supporting a hood over the range.
• Add feet to the bottom of your base cabinets in the toekick area
• Do without a toekick and have legs or a pedestal instead, especially in historic houses where this would have been done in the original period. Try the pedestal idea before you do it, to make sure you can still work at the counter without banging your toes.
• Use small spaces between your base cabinets for cookbook shelves, bottle storage, display niches, cutting board or baking sheet storage, pull-out towel storage, narrow pullout racks for spices, etc.

Don’t forget that the best kitchen design for you is likely to grow out of multiple possible kitchen layouts. Don’t get stuck on just one idea – and have fun creating your custom island!