Our tips

They say that a cluttered home reflects a cluttered mind. And it’s not just wise feng shui masters who say so. A well-organized interior makes your life more zen. To make your daily life easier, your household tasks smoother, and your cooking more fun, there’s a plethora of concrete solutions to zen up your kitchen and bathroom.

Open spaces

Uncluttered working surfaces will help you improve your kitchen’s ergonomics and functionality when you’re cooking the family dinner. When it comes to designing your kitchen layout, consider such options as a closed breakfast nook, a base cabinet with a pull-out shelf for your small appliances, an open or built-in niche, or you could even hide the counter microwave behind a door that opens upwards.

Divide and conquer

Ever reached up to open a kitchen cupboard and have a stack of plastic lids fall on your head? Drawers and cabinets exist to organize your items, but they’re not enough to properly store your multitude of differently shaped accessories, either in the kitchen or the bathroom. Inside each drawer and on each shelf, you should use compartments and dividers to improve your storage.

In drawers, dividers can separate your cutlery and kitchen utensils. For those unruly stacks of plasticware, a cross-bar divider across the drawer can let you stack the lids on one side and the containers on the other. Or consider a door mount on the inside of a cabinet door, so you can tuck away your pot lids or cutting boards. Adjustable-height shelving and pull-out modules are great for pantry items, spices and garbage bins. You can take full advantage of every square inch of your cabinet storage, and avoid searching futilely for items hidden away at the bottom.

Optimize every corner

When designed well, corner cabinets can provide plenty of storage space for larger items. We recommend limiting the number of shelves in corner in favour of hardware accessories and mechanisms like the Power Slide, which can come completely out of the corner, Lazy Susan-type rotating storage or the Magic Corner with individual baskets.

 

Functional choices

If you find yourself blindly feeling around the kitchen cabinet for your star anise or contorting yourself to look through all your cans, then your space is not adapted to your reality. When you design the layout, consider the movements you’ll be making when preparing lunches or cleaning up after dinner.

One important ergonomic detail to consider is the opening mechanism for your cabinets and drawers: do you prefer push or pull? Push-open systems are the smart choice for overhead cabinets. Not only do they have a clean, handle-free minimalist look, they also have the advantage of opening with a simple push – very practical when your hands are covered in flour! The only drawback however is that these push mechanisms need to be readjusted on occasion. As for drawers, they should be drawn open, as their name suggests, so a pull system makes sense. You just need to choose between handles or handle-free.

Finally, to take full advantage of vertical space, consider using stand-alone shelving and storage units, which take up little floor space but offer lots of storage. This could make for ideal storage for your broom, mop, vacuum cleaner, and other items you want in easy reach when you need them.

Photo credit : Blum