The kitchen is one of the most important rooms in your home. It’s even been called the heart of the home, and for good reason. The kitchen is one of the most used rooms in your home during waking hours. It’s not only where you prepare your meals, it’s also the social hub of the home. It’s where friends and families spontaneously gather. It’s a work center where homework and other projects are done. And it’s often the focus of home renovations and building projects.

Because the kitchen play such a crucial role in every day living, it’s extremely important to make sure that you ‘get it right’ when you plan a remodel. But it can be difficult to know where to begin. Each person’s idea of a ‘perfect kitchen’ is different. So that’s where the design process needs to start.

What do you want?

Your kitchen should reflect your personality and lifestyle. So, you need to ask yourself what you want your kitchen to look like and how you’d like it to function. This means that you need to weigh two different, sometimes complimentary and sometimes contradictory, considerations. Do you want to focus on form and function or style and usability.

Style

There is a large variety of styles to choose from in home design: art deco, classical, rustic, modern, contemporary, traditional, colonial, asian, country, victorian and tudor – just to name a few. If you leaf through a custom home magazine, or through some Pinterest boards, you find that your eyes will linger on some design styles more than others and others will do nothing for you and your eyes will skim right over them. But how do you really know which style is right for you?

Here are some questions you should ask yourself;

What is my general sense of style? Do I gravitate towards contemporary designs or do I prefer things that are more traditional or rustic?

What is the style in the rest of my home? Should I carry design aspects from other rooms of my home to the kitchen?

What do I hate about my current kitchen?

What color combinations do I like?

What kind of lighting is currently in my kitchen? Do I want more natural or artificial lighting? What kind of fixtures do I like?

Usability

Having a kitchen that looks great is nice, but if it doesn’t function the way you need it to you’ll end up regretting it. Your kitchen needs to be designed to fit your lifestyle.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself when considering your kitchens functionality;

What is it about my kitchen that annoys me the most? (Ignore color and decor for  now and focus on organization, lighting, and usability.)

How does my family use the kitchen? Cooking, gathering, homework, laundry, bills, and meals for example.

How much storage space do I need? Should I add a pantry?

What appliances do I need or want? (ex: range, oven, cook-top, microwave, coffee/espresso machine, freezer, dishwaasher, trash compactor, washer/dryer.)

What kind of flooring do I want? What kind of traffic will be coming through the kitchen? Are there pets or young children to consider?

How do I want the kitchen organized?

Do I need a center island?

Do I need multiple sinks?

How much cooking do we do?

Do we entertain a lot?

Answering these questions can be extremely helpful. But for many people it’s a matter of ‘I’ll know it when I see it’, and that’s not a bad thing. Be sure to scour through google, bing, and pinterest for images of custom kitchens and save pictures of the ones that you really like.