How to create the perfect kitchen – according to a chef
How to create the perfect kitchen is one of the most common conundrums of designing a home. And as it is a room that is often on show – the modern open-plan kitchen is usually where a family spends most of their time, and hosts friends for morning coffees or dinner parties – our requirements are getting more and more specific.
Deep drawers, rather than a room full of cupboards, are popular right now. “I think people have come to realise how functional and practical deep pan-drawers are,” says Will Eaves, the design and development director at British -Standard by Plain English. Open shelving is also an increasingly common choice: “We’ve seen more and more clients with smaller-scale -kitchens opting for open shelving to give a greater feeling of space,” Eaves adds.
Wooden worktops are top of renovators’ lists, according to Eaves. “They’re more in demand than usual. I think it’s because wood adds warmth to a space, which other -materials like stone can’t quite achieve,” he says. Carrara marble is also popular, according to Helen Parker from deVOL, who says her customers “now want matching marble sinks, too”.
Even if you’re not in the market for a full renovation, a few adaptations can make all the difference to the flow of your space – and the speed at which you can get dinner on the table every day.
Where and what you leave out on the countertops, for example, can make a huge difference to the feel of your kitchen. “Freestanding pieces of kitchen furniture and -mixing new cupboards with old is a popular choice,” Parker says, adding that deVOL’s marble-topped prep table is now often used in place of an island. Built-in pantry cupboards are increasing in popularity – with plug sockets inside to house ugly microwaves and giant mixers.
But while most of us spend, at best, only a few hours a day in our kitchens, perhaps dreaming of more time in there, some people spend all day in the kitchen, only to come home to another one. So who better to ask about how to achieve the perfect home kitchen than a quartet of -professional cooks who have worked out exactly what they need in theirs?
Tom Aikens
Founder of restaurants including the Michelin-starred Muse by Tom Aikens
“One of the worst things in a kitchen,” says chef Tom Aikens, “is not having enough space. As long as you’ve got enough worktop space, you can make the flow of things work.” So when he and his wife first looked around their Oxfordshire home in 2019, it was the large kitchen that sold them the house.
He found that the country-style kitchen they inherited was perfect for their needs and he hasn’t changed anything substantially. “Along with a good amount of worktop space, which I need because I’ve got quite a bit of equipment, it’s really important to have a good-sized kitchen sink and with a big enough drainage area to the side so that you can wash up without piling things on top of each other,” he adds.
On the countertop he keeps out “anything that I use regularly, so ingredients like salts and peppers, and different oils from rapeseed to sunflower to olive oil, to bits of equipment such as knives and a pestle and mortar. I like to have everything close by when I’m cooking, as it makes the whole process much quicker than if you’re fumbling around in a cupboard.”
In his cupboards he has Kilner jars with dried goods inside: “I live in the countryside, so you have to protect against mice,” he says. Spices all have their sell-by dates written on the outsides of the jars: “I don’t mind a month or two over, but anything longer and I refresh.”
But really, Aikens is a true fan of drawer storage. Next to the cooker is a stack of drawers with cutlery at the top, the next drawer down with the electric scales and baking equipment including pastry cutters and piping nozzles – “my girls like to come down in the morning and bake and create havoc, so it needs to be somewhere they can reach” – and pots and pans at the bottom. A separate drawer contains crockery.
For his large pieces of chef’s kit, such as the dehydrator and the sous-vide machine, he uses the adjoining utility room as “another kitchen”.
He recommends the practicality of two ovens, if space permits. “You can have things on at the same time that need different temperatures, which is especially good if the girls are baking while I need to make dinner.”
Ella Mills
Founder of deliciouslyella.com
For Ella Mills, the kitchen has to be an oasis of calm. “The environment you create when you cook is really important. I find it hard to relax and be creative – which is what I need when I’m recipe testing, for example – when the kitchen looks like a bomb site. Our old kitchen constantly looked like that; you just had to chop an onion and suddenly it looked a total mess.”
In May, she redesigned her kitchen from scratch, using the kitchen supplier Neptune. “It’s the first one I’ve actually got to do; we’ve always moved into houses that have already had perfectly good kitchens, even if they weren’t to our taste,” she says.
First on her list was clever storage. Mills says she prefers drawers to cupboards: “It means you can see everything, get to every last centimetre of space, and nothing gets lost at the back.” All her pans are in a deep drawer next to the hob in an island, while hand blenders, zesters, tin openers and “all those tools that you never know where to put” are in a slightly shallower drawer, each in their own space within drawer dividers, and then there’s a hidden drawer at the top containing all the cutlery. “I’m an organisational fiend,” she confesses.
Mills did away with wall cupboards to maximise the feeling of airiness in the kitchen, preferring instead a shallow shelf with pot plants. However, the one exception to the no-cupboard rule is an enormous larder that not only houses spices, jars and packets, but also larger kitchen appliances such as the Magimix and the toaster.
“We put a plug inside the cupboard, so you don’t have to take anything out, you just use it in there and then close the door on it when you’re done,” she says. “It just helps streamline the cooking process, which is important to do, especially when you’ve got a lot else going on in life. Cooking can be a faff at times, and so if you remove obstacles in the way, you organise your equipment or have things at the ready, it just makes it all much easier and more enjoyable.”
That thinking extended to the way she laid out the kitchen. The hob and oven, located in the central island, allow her to look out on the rest of the kitchen and the window beyond when she’s cooking. The sink is at the side of the room, facing the wall. “You have to think about where you spend the most amount of time,” she says. “Traditionally, the sink is placed in front of the window, but I don’t actually spend much time at the sink – I mostly put everything in the dishwasher. I’m more often standing at the hob, so looking out into the room and out of the window from there is much better.”
She chose a marble composite for the worktops “which is really practical. In our first house, we inherited a kitchen with real marble worktops and we were weaning our first daughter at the time. It was gorgeous, but impossible not to stain and I just thought, never again.”
Thomasina Miers
Founder of Wahaca restaurants and author of ‘Meat-Free Mexican’
Thomasina Miers is used to a fast-paced kitchen. She has 13 restaurants in her Mexican chain, Wahaca, while at home, with three children to feed and regular large dinner parties hosted in her north London kitchen, her needs are no less demanding.
It was the kitchen that made Miers fall in love with the house four years ago. “It is such a lovely size, with lots of light,” she says. But the property hadn’t been updated for 40 years and needed modernisation.
She had two frustrations with the kitchen in her previous home: “Firstly, it was very dark, which I hated.” The new kitchen was already light-filled, but Miers also installed doors into the garden, “inspired by an abbey visit on holiday in Burgundy. My kitchen garden is now right outside the back. It becomes a place to grow lots of leaves and herbs I need for meals.”
The second frustration was around washing up. “I found that whenever we had friends over, the washing up would pile up on the side and it never felt relaxing; it was looming over the end of the meal. Then I went for dinner at someone’s home who had a sink behind closed doors, so you could put all the dishes in there, shut the doors and continue socialising. I thought it was a brilliant idea and wanted to copy that for our kitchen.”
Miers has one sink in the kitchen for daily use, positioned within steps of the fridge and the cooker, “in that holy triangle of design you hear about”, she says. But she has a second, secret one in an ancillary room that also has a pantry and larder. “A larder sounds so grand, but it’s an incredibly practical place to store food. It’s slightly cooler in there than the main kitchen, so it’s a good place to cool stock or jams.” The room has wooden swing doors, inspired by a visit to a country house, and built by her father, a carpenter.
Her pantry-cum-larder is, she says, an intrinsic factor of the kitchen, and perhaps the hardest-working area. “I do keep the pantry organised. I have pulses, grains and pastas in one section; nuts and fruit in another; tubs of flour – I buy 16kg sacks at a time as we get through a lot – under the marble worktop, for making bread. There’s also a section for chutneys, jams and condiments, along with jars that I keep for making jam and chutney.”
She has neat little brass labels she intends to put up on the shelves – although she hasn’t quite got round to it – but her biggest organisation tip, she says, is the chalkboard, “for writing down when you finish a packet of something and need to add it to the shopping list. At the moment it has oyster sauce, fennel seeds and Swiss chard, and I see that my youngest has written Alphabites on there, too,” she laughs.
Miers was keen to upcycle as many of the materials from the original kitchen as possible, to save resources. She tasked her father with turning the wooden cupboard doors into drawers, which, she says, are “much more useful, because you pull them out, see everything, and nothing gets hidden at the back. They’re just a more intuitive place to store things.” Miers lined the few remaining cupboards with lino: “It’s so practical because it wipes clean.”
Her father came up trumps again when he turned reclaimed giant cheeseboards into her long, extendable kitchen table. “You can add leaves in to make it bigger or smaller, depending on how many guests you have,” Miers says.
He even built the staircase up to the mezzanine office above the kitchen. “We had great fun designing it; it’s very modern. It’s a lovely place to work as it’s quiet and light-filled in the day,” she adds.
While not everyone might have a family member with her father’s level of skill, Miers says working with a woodworker on your kitchen can result in the exact design you need, as well as perhaps working out more cheaply if you can reuse materials.
Other items are vintage, such as the lights above the kitchen table, sourced from Retrouvius, or made by craftspeople, such as the custom-made structure that the lights hang from, built by someone in the north of England who had previously made something similar for her Shoreditch restaurants.
Miers, who is an ambassador for food charities including the Soil Association and Chefs in Schools, is passionate about reducing food waste. As well as making sure she reuses leftovers in creative ways, she keeps bins by the industrial dishwasher for recycling, food waste and scraps she can compost. “I think throwing away food in the main bin is slightly immoral and almost criminal. When you think of how we cut down the Amazon to grow the food we eat, we shouldn’t be wasting anything. You just need to be organised and methodical.”
‘Meat-Free Mexican’ (￡25, Hodder) is out now
Claire Ptak
Owner of the bakery Violet Cakes and author of ‘Love Is a Pink Cake’
Claire Ptak’s dedication to a tidy kitchen is such that on her terrace, just outside her kitchen’s balcony door, is a large storage box, “which is intended for garden furniture but actually has all my cake tins, platters and stands in,” she says. “I like to have everything to hand, but don’t like anything to be out on the counter, so I have to be very organised about how I use the cupboards in the kitchen.”
She develops most of her recipes at home. “I make them for home cooks, so it’s important to start off in my kitchen, and then I scale them up for the bakery.” It befits her training: “I came from Chez Panisse [Alice Waters’ acclaimed California restaurant], which was very much like a home cooking environment, and it was low-key, rather than a military operation.”
The kitchen in her rented east London flat is small, but Ptak says it forces her to be edited and organised. “Everything that wins a spot in my kitchen is something I use, otherwise it goes in storage elsewhere. There’s nothing that is purely here for decoration.” Ideally, she would have more drawers than the kitchen’s two, where she stores her six or seven types of flour and various sugars. “I have friends who worked at Noma, and because of the way they’ve been trained, in their own homes they keep everything in plastic containers with perfectly framed labels, but I’m not like that,” she says. Her dry ingredients are kept in the bags they come in, sealed with rubber bands, so that she can keep on top of use-by dates.
Her tools are all within easy reach. She has three utensil containers on the worktop, next to her stand mixers. “One crock is dedicated to rubber spatulas, one is all wooden spoons, another has mashers for fruit and jams, slotted spoons and decorating spatulas,” she says.
She would also love a bigger worktop – not least to allow more space to bake with her seven-year-old daughter, Frances, who one might imagine thinks her baker mother has the coolest job. Not so. She has told her that she doesn’t like cake. “But she has just started making cookies with me,” says Ptak.
‘Love Is a Pink Cake’ (￡27, Square Peg) is out now