The kitchen at home is a focal point of life for many homeowners. Accordingly, its design and furnishings are important. The trend continues to be towards more comfort, paired with new colors, shapes and materials.
Do you know the feeling? You arrive at a friends' party - and find most of the guests sitting in the kitchen making small talk. Kitchens have exerted an almost magical attraction on people since time immemorial. In the past, fires crackled around the clock, people roasted, cooked and baked, and the aromas of herbs and fresh fruit mingled with roasted meat or fish. Nowadays, however, the kitchen is much more than just a place to prepare food. In today's kitchens, people sit together, make plans, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, drink coffee or wine, laugh - and live life to the full.
Accordingly, you should be careful when planning or modernizing your kitchen. But what is there to consider at the moment?
Separation returns
The open kitchen has become an integral part of modern planning, whether for aesthetic reasons or simply because the limited living space forces architects to do so. Nevertheless, a trend reversal is on the horizon: Kitchens continue to share a room with dining and living furniture, but are increasingly becoming slightly separated in their unity.
This can be done using room dividers in the form of shelves that are accessible from both sides, but also using real, semi-recessed walls or even using different levels of the home that are connected to each other via open balustrades and stairs. In the USA, this change in trend has been making itself felt for some time as so-called „broken plan living“.
Formerly notorious for its old-fashioned cut wooden fronts, the country house style is making a comeback with modern, polished wooden fronts with a delicate frame look. Speaking of wood: wood is one of the most beautiful materials that nature has to offer. And, of course, wood has never really gone away - but for years it was associated in the kitchen with old-fashioned country house kitchens and difficult-to-clean material that expands, absorbs dirt and dyes and swells and warps with liquids such as water.
With the interest in the Danish lifestyle „Hygge“ and the associated turn towards the comfort of one's own four walls, the enthusiasm for wood has also grown again.
Copper and gold have already conquered the kitchen in recent years, and now another high-quality metal is following suit: stainless steel. This surface has long been popular in the catering industry for hygienic and easy-care reasons. It is now also finding its way into private kitchens with all its functional advantages. But the focus here is not only on function, stainless steel is simply an incomparable eye-catcher and also incomparably popular as a decorative element. Stainless steel surfaces simply give the kitchen a cool and modern look. Stainless steel can be found not only in kitchen fronts or surfaces, but also in handles, fittings, worktop edges and skirting boards. Combined with innovative high-tech appliances, futuristic lights and more, stainless steel creates an almost utopian ambience.
Dark colors in the kitchen: Black is back
In terms of colour schemes, dark tones such as anodized aluminium, anthracite-coloured plastic or natural stone in greige are currently dominating again because Italians love heavy tones and, unlike their German neighbors, are not afraid of them for a lively room like the kitchen.
Designers from all countries can agree on black: the mysterious, deep dark color simply never goes out of fashion and was also seen in rich, matt lacquered tones at many German kitchen and appliance manufacturers. Black appears as the color of shelf struts, as an elegant work surface in Fenix with anti-fingerprint or as tinted glass in Carbonblack for high-quality built-in units. Or to put it another way: black has reclaimed its place - if it was ever gone.
More space for storage
A kitchen space is only ever as good as the planner who creates it. Storage space is one of the most pressing requirements that needs to be considered - and yet it often comes at the expense of the aesthetics of a beautiful kitchen space. Nevertheless, a clear, visual inclusion of storage space is emerging for the future: it will be made visible in the form of vertically used surfaces and horizontally movable surfaces. Various manufacturers offer kitchen islands that consist of an open stainless steel tray for all kinds of kitchen utensils and can be covered with sliding worktops and closed off as required. Practical and beautiful at the same time.
Kitchens are getting smarter
In addition to design and fittings, technology plays a central role in kitchen design. Here, as in other living spaces, everything revolves around smart home technology. Motto: Kitchen appliances are becoming more intelligent and initiate work processes independently without waiting for commands from smartphones and tablets. Good examples of this are self-dosing dishwashers (Miele), the self-dosing washing machine (Bosch, Siemens) or the intelligent hob (V-ZUG, Miele, Siemens), whose cooking settings follow the respective cookware on the hob everywhere. In the future, the smart home will not only be able to cope with less human intervention in the technology, but will also streamline its design: fewer and fewer buttons and knobs will be needed to make settings. The smart home will generate many things from accumulated experience (for example, how long a dish needs to bake until it is cooked), while others will be perceived via sensors (for example, how dirty the plates and cups in the dishwasher are).
Herb garden in the kitchen
Kitchen furnishings now include small, integrated herb gardens that keep herbs quickly to hand to provide fresh seasoning for dishes. These indoor herb vases are not only practical vitamin and spice dispensers, but also a wonderfully contrasting, fresh and natural counterpart to the cold and rough industrial look of the new kitchen generation. Editorial team
Nolte Home Studio
Tel. +34 971 84 61 64
Light - Cocinas de Nopper
Tel. +34 871 18 02 20
The Kitchen House
Tel. +34 600 51 25 99
deku Küchen- & Grillzentrum
Tel. +34 971 68 56 97
