Renovating your vintage kitchen

While vintage kitchen containers and cutlery can add charm to a kitchen, the reality is that vintage kitchen fittings and stoves don't tend be as charming. They can be hard to clean and hard to maintain. They also tend to cook unevenly which can be challenging for cooks used to contemporary kitchens. As the Australian cuisine has changed and moved away from roasting, baking and grilling towards stir-fries, salads and smoothies, the kitchen needs different equipment and spaces for food preparation and cooking.

Here are some of the aspects you should be considering when redesigning your kitchen.

What kinds of food do you cook most often?

If you tend to cook stir-fries regularly you might appreciate a wok ring, whereas raw food fans might look to have more bench space to prepare their meals.

Where does your family tend to eat?

If you family often heads through the kitchen on their way to other events you might like to incorporate a breakfast bar where people can stop in for snacks, but if you favour sit down meals you might like to incorporate a kitchen table to sit at for meals.

How much floor space do you have?

If you are working with the boundaries of your current house, it can seem limiting to have such a small area for a kitchen, as the contemporary style is for the kitchen to blend into and be part of the living area. Look at whether you can demolish some of the walls between the kitchen and surrounding rooms and potentially expand your kitchen space that way. Remember that bedrooms and living areas can easily be interchanged so a neighbouring bedroom can easily become part of a kitchen/lounge area and the lounge room can become a bedroom if you need it to.

How will your renovated kitchen fit in with the rest of the house?

If you are only renovating your kitchen, you might like to think about how the new kitchen will fit it with the rest of the house visually. It might be the case that in an older house with lots of dark hard wood, a lot of metallic features don't fit in very well. However, some new white marble bench tops fit in with the house aesthetic, while looking clean and contemporary.

If you are looking to redesign your kitchen, meetings with an experienced kitchen design and renovation firm can help open your eyes to new possibilities.