How to make the most of a small kitchen

Maximise your kitchen cabinet space with tips from DIY Homefit

We’ve all heard the phrase that small is beautiful. But if you have a small kitchen, is that really true? All the glamorous magazine-style kitchens seem to be enormous, with different zones for everything, and happy looking people. So if your kitchen feels like a shoebox in comparison, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re just stuck with a kitchen that will never look good.

Wrong! Small can indeed be beautiful. And in this article we share a few tips to make the most of your small kitchen.

Clear the clutter

Any kitchen looks better when it is tidy. And this is particularly important in a small kitchen. When you don’t have much surface space, every inch matters. So anything that does not absolutely need to be out on a surface should be put away. 

DIY Homefit can help with this! We supply a wide range of clever kitchen storage solutions to maximise the space inside your kitchen cabinets and keep those surfaces clear. For example, we can provide you with pull out shelving, carousel cupboards, pan drawers, wine and spice racks and pull out waste bins. You can find out more on our kitchen storage page here.

Many kitchen cabinets are also now designed to conceal small kitchen appliances such as kettles, coffeemakers, toasters and blenders so that you don’t need to leave them out on the surfaces.

Another great way to clear clutter is to use open shelving on your kitchen walls. This could either be integrated in with your kitchen cabinets – as shown below – or mounted separately on any spare section of wall. Open shelving can provide much-needed extra storage space for your kitchen, and can also add interest and personality to your kitchen. However, be careful to keep the shelves neat, tidy and clean, otherwise they could become an eyesore that you would rather do without!

A whiter shade of pale

Using pale neutral colours in your small kitchen will help it to look a lot bigger. Choosing the right shade really does make a difference. So a good starting point to making the most of your small kitchen is to go for pale colours neutral throughout, including walls, kitchen cabinets, appliances and flooring. This will bring a clean fresh look to your kitchen that will also deceive the eye into thinking it is larger than it actually is.

Although the image below is of a larger kitchen, you can imagine how much smaller it would look if the kitchen cabinets, paintwork and flooring were all darker. These kitchen cabinet doors are from our Carrick range, with a wide range of colours and finishes to choose from, one of which will be perfect for your small beautiful kitchen.

Create as much light as possible

Another striking thing from the above image is the amount of natural light in this kitchen. The more light you can create in your kitchen, the bigger it will look. In the above image, there are large bifold doors as well as a window above the sink. 

So what you need to do in your smaller kitchen is firstly to make the most of any doors or windows that you have, ensuring that they are not hidden by curtains or blinds. If you don’t have much natural light, would it be possible to install or extend windows or doors, or perhaps get a skylight installed?

If natural light is a problem, the next best thing is to use as much good quality artificial lighting as you can. For example ceiling lights – either pendant lighting, spotlights or LED lights – and also wall lights. You will also find that if you can use as much glass in your kitchen as possible – for example mirrors, picture frames or glass kitchen cabinet doors – this will really help to reflect light around the room and make it lighter and brighter.

Go for gloss

We’ve just looked at the benefit of glass in your kitchen in terms of reflecting light around. And you can also augment this effect by using reflective surfaces in your kitchen. For example glossy kitchen cabinet doors, worktops and splashbacks, stainless steel appliances and shiny floor tiles can all help to reflect light around your kitchen and make it feel brighter and fresher. You can see this effect in the image below, which shows our handleless J-Pull kitchen cabinet doors in Supergloss White.

Show your curves

Another great way to make the most of a small kitchen is to use curved kitchen cabinet doors. These help to create soft smooth lines and can take up less space than traditional square lines. The whole effect is a gentle ambience that creates an illusion of more space than there actually is.

The image below shows our curved Flat Slab acrylic kitchen cabinet doors in Acrylic Light Grey. Flat Slab doors can be supplied either with a sleek handle of your choice or without a handle, using push-to-open technology instead. You can read more about these beautiful kitchen cabinet doors on our Flat Slab kitchen door page here.

Use integrated appliances

Another important consideration that can really help to make your small kitchen feel bigger is to use integrated appliances with the same door fronts as your kitchen cabinets. This will give your kitchen a streamlined minimalist look

If there is a particular appliance that you want to showcase – for example a retro fridge freezer or statement hob – just focus on this as the centrepiece and keep everything else around it as neutral and streamlined as possible.

We hope that the above tips help you to make the most of your small kitchen and to appreciate that small really can be beautiful.

For more kitchen ideas and inspiration, take a browse through DIY Homefit’s gallery of kitchen pictures and see what you could adapt for your own kitchen.

Do visit us again soon for more lifestyle tips from DIY Homefit.