The kitchen is one of the rooms in the home that has the most potential to stand out with a sleek and modern aesthetic. Its broad array of utilities, equipment and storage solutions mean that you can really get creative and make your kitchen look modern even on a budget.
Turning on the style doesn’t have to call for a full kitchen makeover; simply by using some small tweaks and design tips, you can modernise your kitchen space without breaking the bank.
Painting cabinets and cupboards
Most fitted kitchen makeovers will include painted cabinets in sleek colours, such as grey or blue hues. You can achieve this look with half the cost by repainting your cabinets in these colours, starting by sanding down the cabinet surfaces and then giving them a few coats of paint. This can have a major positive effect on the whole room, introducing a more contemporary look by removing outdated wooden cabinets that darken the light in your kitchen.
Kitchen equipment
You could take all the necessary steps to get your kitchen as pristine as possible, but don’t forget that the equipment in the room also ties into the overall aesthetic. Having old and outdated equipment will hold back how modern the kitchen appears. Replacing old pan sets with hard ionised cookware will add to the kitchen design when stored in plain view, rather than take away from it. The same goes for your appliances; a vintage-look fridge or toaster will stand out and look out of place in a minimalistic modern kitchen.
Lighting
To create a modern feel, the lighting in your kitchen should be optimised to encourage light to enter and fill the room. This will help to make the room feel more spacious and open, a key element of a contemporary kitchen. Although it can be difficult to bring more natural light into a room, there are some things that you can do:
- Clear space in front of windows; this will help to increase the amount of light that can enter the room.
- Add a mirror into your kitchen to reflect light into darker areas of the room and open the space.
- Add new lighting fixtures; this could mean brighter lights to better illuminate the kitchen or smaller, incremental sources of light such as lamps to improve the lights’ overall coverage.
Organisation
Having clutter and kitchen equipment spilling onto the worktops can be counterproductive when you are trying to create a minimalistic design. To keep your kitchen from becoming untidy, you should create designated places for all your kitchen equipment. If you struggle to find places for all your equipment, you can integrate more storage into the kitchen to create homes for items that may be invading your surfaces. This could mean utilising vertical space by fitting shelving onto walls, increasing storage capacity without decreasing floorspace. Another method would be reorganising cupboards to neatly store away more items.
Once you have made these tweaks, you will find yourself with a sleek, modern kitchen of which you can be proud – all without breaking the bank or forking out the cost of larger renovations.
