When dealing with small kitchen designs, it is critical to remember that, although you may only have eight linear feet of counter top, it is vital to place it where it can be most useful.  An eight foot long island may look great, but if you have no counter space next to your sink or your stove, you will have to do a lot more work.  Having counter space to prep your food between your sink and stove allows for minimal mess and maximum accessibility.  Even if your stove is on one wall and your sink is on an adjacent wall, four feet of corner counter top can be just as efficient as eight.   The cornering of the counter also allows you to place items such as a bread maker or toaster out of your “everyday” space and into an area that is still easy to reach.  This still allows for additional counter space on the outsides of your stove and sink, which can be used to cover the dishwasher or additional under-counter cabinets.

Using appliances that mount under your top cabinets, such as coffee makers and toaster ovens, can free up what little counter space you have for better use.

Whether you are designing a small kitchen from scratch or simply doing a small kitchen remodel, cabinet space is the other major factor in your kitchen’s functionality.  If you can not reach a shelf in the cabinet, what good does it do?  If you have to pull out six things to get to the one thing you need at the back of a cabinet, you are wasting your time.  Cabinets that are designed for specific use are the best.  If every shelf is at the same level, but you only stack dishes on three of them, the shelf you put your canned goods on wastes the top eight to ten inches of your space.

If you do not have the money for custom designed cabinets, a simple solution is stackable pull-out wire baskets or drawers from The Container Store or even Wal-Mart.  This can be especially important when dealing with your under-counter cabinets.  Being able to pull a drawer out to access the items at the back of the cabinet saves time and effort, and these cabinets will be deeper than your top cabinets, often without any shelves in them at all.

Often, cabinets that meet each other at a corner simply have blank space between them.  Make use of that space by building a corner cabinet instead.  A corner cabinet can be fitted with a lazy susan so that you don’t have to take everything out to get to the items at the back of the cabinet.  These can also be the best cabinets in your kitchen for your “storage items,” such as the china or crystal.  If you rarely use something, but don’t want to search through a box to find it, a corner cabinet gives you extra depth and space that would otherwise be wasted.

In small kitchen design, the most important thing is function.  No matter how good it looks, if you can’t use it, it’s wasted.  If you can’t reach it, it’s pointless.  If you have to spend more time and effort getting to it or doing it, you’ve probably just let your chicken burn.

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!