Planning kitchen storage around what you own

A kitchen designed from a catalogue has a run of base units, some wall cupboards, and a total storage volume that sounds generous. A kitchen designed around a household has the same total volume distributed differently, and the difference between the two is whether you can find the colander.

The method we use is not clever. Before drawing anything, we go through the existing kitchen with the client and write down what is in it. Not a rough impression. An actual list, with the awkward items measured.

Start with the inventory

Write down every category and count it. Dinner plates, side plates, bowls, mugs, glasses of each type, pans with lids, baking trays, chopping boards, storage containers, the small appliances, the things that only come out at Christmas.

Two things happen. First, you get a real volume rather than a guess, and it is nearly always different from what people expect. Second, and more usefully, people start making decisions. Almost every household we have worked with owns more mugs than they can name a use for and at least three chopping boards they never touch. That conversation is easier to have with a list on the table than in the abstract.

Measure the difficult things properly. The tallest bottle you keep out. The biggest pan including its handle. The stand mixer with the bowl on. The cereal boxes, which are taller than people think and are the reason so many larder shelves end up with a wasted band of empty space. Those measurements set real cupboard dimensions.

Drawers below, doors above

A 600mm deep base unit with a door is a bad piece of design that we have all agreed to accept. The front 300mm gets used and the back 300mm becomes archaeology. To reach anything you kneel down and take out the things in front of it.

Deep drawers solve it completely. Everything comes to you, you see the whole contents from above, and the back of the cupboard is as usable as the front. Drawers cost roughly a third more per unit than doors, and in base units it is the best money in the whole kitchen. If the budget will not stretch to all of them, put drawers where the pans and the food go and doors where the bins and the cleaning things go.

Above worktop height the logic reverses, because a wall cupboard is shallow enough to see into and a drawer at eye level is useless.

Think in zones, not in cupboards

Things should live near where they are used, which sounds obvious and is routinely ignored. Plates belong next to the dishwasher, because unloading happens several times a week and carrying plates to the table happens once a meal. Pans belong next to the hob. Chopping boards and knives belong next to the main preparation surface. The bin belongs within a step of the preparation surface, not under the sink at the other end.

The height zones matter as much as the plan. Everything between knee and shoulder height is prime storage and should hold what you touch daily. Below knee height, use deep drawers for heavy items, because bending to a drawer is fine and reaching into a low cupboard is not. Above shoulder height, put things you use monthly, and accept that anything above 1.9m needs a step and will be forgotten.

Corners, and the honest answer about them

Every corner solution is a compromise. Carousels lose volume and jam. Pull out mechanisms cost several hundred pounds and hold less than the space they occupy. A blind corner unit is cheap and swallows things.

Where the room allows, our preference is to avoid the corner altogether, by stopping a run short and putting a tall unit or an open shelf on the return. Where it does not allow, we take the corner as a deliberately low value store for the things you use twice a year, and we do not spend money on a mechanism to make a bad location convenient.

Two things that are not storage

The worktop is not storage. Every appliance parked on it permanently reduces the surface you have to work on, which is the scarcest resource in most kitchens. If the toaster and the kettle and the mixer all live out, you have a 3m worktop and 1.4m of usable surface. Plan a home for the ones you use weekly rather than daily.

The larder is not a cupboard with a fancy name. What makes a larder work is shallow shelves, usually 200mm to 250mm, so that everything sits in a single row and nothing hides behind anything. A deep larder is just a cupboard where food goes to expire.

What this looks like in practice

In the kitchen in a Victorian terrace the room was 2.4m wide and there was no possibility of adding volume, so all of it came from distribution. Counting first told us the household needed far more space for pans than for crockery, which set the entire base unit layout.

In the one bedroom flat above a shop the inventory did something more important. It made the conversation about what to keep concrete, at a point when our client was moving from a four bedroom house and had not yet decided. The list was the design tool and the storage was the consequence.

None of this requires a bigger kitchen or a bigger budget. It requires an hour with a notebook before anybody draws a line, and it is the hour that decides whether you like the kitchen in five years.