Designing A Great Galley Kitchen

Galley kitchens are characterised by having two facing walls and a long, narrow floor space between parallel benchtops.

Though compact by design, choosing this style of kitchen is in no way an impediment to injecting wow-factor design to your home. Today’s galley kitchens use stunning contemporary fixtures and fittings and are perfectly suited to the uncluttered visual lines preferred by architects and interior designers. Galley kitchens are typically not goodfor entertaining or as eat-in areas, but their utility design uses work areas and storage – including their vertical spaces – with extremeefficiency.

A Smart Use Of Space

A galley kitchenis often a design choice that is set by the available space in your home. Being long and narrow, they are more common in smaller homes and apartments and work best when just one or two people will regularly use the area at the same time. Galley kitchens maximise every available open space and encourage good organisation. With such limitations, your design should incorporate the investment of customised storage to fit your lifestyle and cooking habits.

Plan For Good Lighting

Galley kitchens by their naturecan lack light, which is as important as space in a small kitchen. Take care to plan lightingto brightenevery corner of your galley kitchen. This encourages use of every available work area and storage space on a daily basis. During the design phase, consider installing under-cabinet lighting for those tucked away sections, to ensure you make the most of every available surface when preparing meals, to get the most out of your kitchen. If yourbudget and architecture permit, a skylight is ideal in a galley kitchen, to enhance illumination during daylight hours.

The Trusty Triangle

Like any efficient kitchen, a great galley design depends on the ‘triangle’ principle. This is where your working space contains appliances, such as the refrigerator and stove on one side, with the sink and main preparation benchtop on the other. This shape gives you practical freedom of movement in even an extended, narrow shaped work area and is particularly important when more than one person is using the room.

Open The Lines

A narrow galley kitchen can seem overly closed in if it presents with walls of floor-to-ceiling cabinetry. You can break upa confined appearance by interspersing your upper cabinets with some open shelving, or even by replacing traditional cupboards with awhole wall of shelves. An alternative is to use glass cabinet doors on the upper levels, or tojust make a feature of glass cupboard doors in a selected location, for a visual break. As well, choosing lighter, rather than dark shades and colours for your surfaces, cabinets and walls worksbest in a galley kitchen to better reflect available light and making the overall room appearmore spacious.