The Ultimate Design Rules for Luxury Kitchens

Upgrading your kitchen from functional cooking and dining space to a luxury room can be done through expert renovation design, but when planning ahead it can be difficult to picture what will add value and what won’t. As with the opulent interior design of many spaces, the key lies in the little details and finishing touches… and here’s the Refresh Renovations’ kitchen specialist’s top design rules for upgrading your kitchen.

Upgrade Kitchen Surfaces

A kitchen can only look as good as its countertops, and a cheap formica type finish simply won’t cut the mustard when it comes to designing a modern luxury kitchen. Whether you’re choosing chunky profiled marble, material mixes or clever worktop illumination, an appropriate countertop can really change the look and feel of the room. Waterfall worktops are growing in popularity as an eye-catching feature; where the countertop ‘flows’ over the sides of units to the floor to create a dramatic aesthetic that looks like a statement piece. This works well on kitchen islands, particularly where the sides are constructed from a material that contrast with it.

Invest in an Island

As mentioned above, kitchen islands make for a fantastic statement – and if you don’t have one, you should consider it. A kitchen island adds form and function to the room as well as a nice focal point for the eye, and can be used for just about everything; including activities that aren’t necessarily food related, as hey, it’s a big flat surface added to the home! Kitchen islands don’t need to just be rectangle shaped and if space isn’t of a virtue, there’s lots of options to choose from. Islands can be designed and created bespoke and can help zone larger, open-plan spaces as well as offer additional work space and even seating.

Illuminate

All too often a kitchen is just lit with spotlights in the ceiling but luxury kitchens tend to have more serious illumination options. A more modern approach to kitchen lighting is to layer the lights to set the mood and offer choices for relevant functional lights. This may include differing shapes, sizes and types of fittings, including spotlights onto particularly well-used worktop areas, a ceiling light for overall illumination and pendant lights down onto dining surfaces for consumption. There’s no need for all the lights to match but try to keep at least a running theme through their aesthetic such as a colour or finish.

Theme with Two Tones

Lots of the home’s interior design is based on more than one colour – for example, a blue and white for a bathroom, a yellow and grey for a living room, and a pink and green for a bedroom. The same is done fairly infrequently for kitchens but can be applied in just as effective a way. Two-tone kitchens can meet your preferences and tastes and are less likely to date quickly as a single hue. You needn’t mix and match on everything, but consider installing coloured fittings such as an island or sink unit as a focal point before adding in a more neutral tone around it. Such usage of colour provides an arty, ‘curated’ feel that most kitchens simply just don’t have.

Come on over to the Dark Side

Kitchen fashion has long been for lightly coloured or pine cabinets, but luxury kitchens often embrace a darker aesthetic. Darker timber in more traditional wooden interior hues needn’t darken a room unnecessarily (especially when specialist lighting is installed) and instead presents a look and feel reminiscent of antique furniture. Combining darker shades with lighter finishing touches such as tiles, cooker hoods, seating and accessories allows for a good balance of colours.

Incorporate Natural Materials

Run-of-the-mill off-the-shelf kitchens are all too often finished with faux wood or plastic, and such detailing can cheapen the look of the room. Incorporating natural materials such as stone, real wood or marble helps lift the feel of a kitchen and can contrast with surfaces of a more usual type. Heavy-veined marble, defined woodgrain and earthy tiling also all provide new textures which can layer the aesthetics and give more interest for the eye.

Go All White

If you’re not likely to leave dark stains on your worktops or to forget about doing the washing up too often, consider abandoning all colour… and going all white for your kitchen. If designed well with clean lines and a crisp clean finish, a white kitchen can be classical and calming. However, the key to maintaining an all-white room is really the cleaning; so opt for wipe-clean surfaces alongside any appliances that will help you manage the workload easier such as dishwashers, boiling water taps and/or a waste disposal chute.

Employ the Experts

It’s easy to walk into a large hardware store and purchase an off-the-shelf kitchen to have installed in your home. However, while these present a cost effective and easy option, such kitchens aren’t designed exactly for your usage and space. Employing a specialist kitchen designer allows you to create a space entirely tailored to you, your family and your intended usage of the space. If you’re more of a takeaway fiend than a cookery enthusiast, this can be incorporated into a smaller workspace and larger, social dining area, or, if you’d like instead specific equipment included, this can be built in. Whatever your needs and desires can be met exactly with a luxury kitchen – as there’s no ‘one size fits all’.
Here at Refresh Renovations, we design beautiful bespoke kitchens daily for homeowners all over the world. With our end-to-end project management approach, we work from conception through to completion with a project manager dedicated to each home; so you can carry on with your day-to-day life and return to the room when it’s ready for you… be that to cook, unbox or wash up!
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