The kitchen is an integral part of our everyday lives. It’s an essential workplace where not only serves as a cooking station but also a social area where eating and relaxation takes place. Since the kitchen plays an essential role in our everyday lifestyle, it must provide the functionality to meet your needs.
The problem with designing a kitchen is the wide variety of materials, finishes, colors, and so much more that makes decorating confusing and stressful. Thankfully, there are trends to follow for ideas and inspiration.
If you want to follow the latest in kitchen designs, here are some of the trends that stood out for 2018.
Two-Toned Cabinets
As the name suggests, a two-toned cabinet features a combination of two different colors on the cabinetry to look more stylish. These types of cabinets are becoming a trend, especially in one colored kitchen since they keep it from looking too flat and stale. It can also give a traditional kitchen a modernized look.
A popular design choice is picking a different color on the wall and cabinets, adding dimension and character to your kitchen.
Two-toned cabinets can also be used to create optical illusions. Higher kitchen ceilings would feel cozier with darker colored upper cabinets. Dark colored lower cabinets are more commonly used to make the ceilings appear higher since kitchens in older homes tend to be smaller.
End of the White Era
White kitchens are a timeless trend. For decades, the color white has been at the top of every kitchen trend, and to this day, it’s still one of the most popular colors used when designing a kitchen. It’s a crowd favorite because of how it can make any space appear lighter, brighter, and larger.
While white is still a classic, the color gray is stepping in as the new favorite as it’s a warmer option to white’s staleness. Some homeowners are already getting tired are getting tired of all white kitchens and are now choosing gray especially in kitchen cabinets.
The color gray can often be seen as dull and depressing. Unlike an all-white kitchen which emits a fresh and bright look, an all gray kitchen would admittedly look boring, but when it’s matched with the right combination, the color gray could create a beautiful and inviting palette for your kitchen.
LED Lighting
Lighting is essential in any kitchen, especially for tasks requiring good visibility such as reading recipes and carefully measuring ingredients, chopping vegetables, and finding things in the back of the cupboards. It can make working easier since it dispels distracting shadows in your work area.
Good lighting is not only practical, but it can also be used to make your space look appealing and pleasing.
While nothing can beat good natural lighting, but artificial light is just as important especially during food preparations in the evening.
Recently, LED lights have been creeping into interior lighting since they come in a range of different options and they burn much less energy. It’s commonly used for under-cabinet lighting which comes in various forms including pucks, strips, and bars.
They might cost a bit more upfront, but it could prove to be cheaper in the long run since LED lighting saves you on some money from your electric bills.
Smart Kitchens
Technology is no longer limited to your smartphones and other gadgets for entertainment. These days, technology has taken over our homes, more specifically, the kitchen and has been integrated into appliances, lighting, and even faucets. You’ll also see some kitchens that have even been built smart from the ground up.
The new technology can be integrated into just about every function in the kitchen. The most common technology you’ll find are motion censored features for faucets and soap dispensers. Popular categories of smart technology also include smart appliances such as refrigerators with internet connections that could also give alerts before you can run out of grocery items.
Wireless and voice-controlled kitchen assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod have been on the rise as well.
Smart kitchen used to be a luxury but this year, including smart appliances and features in the kitchen’s interior design would be the smart choice for any homeowner. With this design, a smart kitchen is a smart way to make lessen any hassle in your lifestyle.
For people who see cooking as a chore would no longer would they have to struggle in doing kitchen work since they can easily find almost any technology possible to turn cooking into a more comfortable task.
Better Storage Solutions
One of the challenges for kitchens everywhere is storages. Having more stuff lessens the space to put everything. Your kitchen can easily be cluttered when you have small appliances to eat up your space. Worst of all, sometimes any available space is too small or too large to properly and effectively store your things.
Living in a cluttered and clamped space can often lead to endless frustrations which is why trends maximizing the storage space in the kitchen is becoming more common in 2018.
There are plenty of creative ways you can make the most of your existing space. You can consider installing organizers such as appliance garages for a small appliance, drawer dividers for cutlery and utensils, walk-in pantry, roll-out trays, lazy Susan, floating shelves, caddies for pots and pans as well as wastebasket pull-outs for garbage and recyclables.
These are only a few of the storage trends that will make it easier to store foods, drinks, and small appliance.
Removing Upper Cabinets
Older kitchen designs tend to include upper cabinetry to stuff dishes, glass wares, and other goods since it was assumed that both the upper and lower cabinets were necessary.
A growing trend for the past few years and more so in 2018 is removing upper wall cabinets as another attempt to make the room appear larger and brighter which isn’t a huge loss since not everyone can reach the top shelves anyway.
The removal of upper cabinets opens the possibility to a lot more interior designs. It frees up space to add in windows to bring in more natural light, add in decorative task lighting, and open up visual space around the room to make it seem less confined.
While trends can give you ideas and guidelines on how to properly decorate a kitchen, at the end of the day, it’s not wise to entirely rely on them for your style choices. Trends come and go. What’s popular today might not be popular tomorrow. If you really want a beautifully designed kitchen, you will have to be creative and follow your vision.
Author Bio –
Mark Cabrera is the Marketing Manager for KitchenCabinetRefacing.com, the Web’s most complete customer resource guide on cabinet refacing. He has worked with the online resource website as one of its top experts and professionals in the field of kitchen cabinet refacing projects. You can find Mark’s various articles in the Kitchen Cabinet Refacing website.