Tips and Advices - A day with a Kitchen Consultant

Kitchen designing is no child’s play. It involves meticulous planning, understanding needs and identifying wants, discovers MILO.**

I spent an entire day with a kitchen consultant. Just to understand what his job exactly entails. At the end of the day I was wiser, enriched and already had a plan in mind for my own kitchen.

I walked in just as JSK (The kitchen consultant - he does not want his name revealed!) was getting ready for his new assigment. He was visiting his client who wanted a designer kitchen. I joined him.

What followed was a complete run down of wants, needs, habits and lifetysles before a design could be conceived.

Here is the first part of the series...

MILO

PLANNING

A good design of kitchen must consider the family’s lifestyle, their eating habits and entertainment patterns. JSK first asked his client these questions:

1. What is your budget?

You have to keep a budget in mind. It’s important to then decide on the amount and kind of structural work, materials to be purchased, as also the appliances that need to be installed.

According to JSK, the ideal budget while making your your kitchen should be anywhere between 5 to 7 per cent of the value of your property.

2. What is your family structure?

Type: Nuclear, single person, a couple, or a joint family. This determines the storage requirements.

Age: Requirement change according to the different ages.

3. What is your storage pattern?

Some people buy and store for a full year, while others do their monthly purchases. Depending on your style, the shelves, cupboards and storage units have to be designed.

4. How often do you have guests over?

Don’t brush tis off as being a weird question. It has an important bearing on the design. This will determine the kind of appliances in your kitchen, the size of the refrigerator, kind of storage, counter area, and so on.

Once these basic questions were answered JSK had a fairly clear idea of what his clients wanted. The next few important aspects of information concerned the sequence and flow of work and the layout.

Watch out for these two aspects, soon...

(To be continued)

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** Milo is HAW’s mascot writer, who makes it his business to find his ways into people’s homes, heads and hearts to quench his thirst of knowing everything there is to know about  homes, real estate, properties, laws, designing, interiors.... Well... everything to do with homes!

Look out for his views, interviews, opinions and stories!