With kitchens being the hub of the home today, they often require a spot for keeping the household organized. We need a place to sort our mail, charge our devices, stash cookbooks, plan menus, keep track of schedules, pay bills and more.
But sometimes there’s enough room in the kitchen only for a mini-office. Here are six key features of a successful kitchen workspace.
1. Is located out of the kitchen work zone. Whether you’ve set up the popular work triangle or work zones, you’ll need the kitchen office to be close yet out of the way.
The far corners of the room are good locations.
So are spots nestled just beyond the main kitchen work area, such as bays or nooks like this. The main part of this kitchen is to the right of this workspace. Cherry provides contrast to the white cabinetry in the rest of the kitchen.
This wall-mounted desk is still part of the kitchen but is tucked just beyond the cabinetry and work zones. The desk is simply a stone top and floating drawer held up by steel brackets.
If space is tight, consider incorporating a secretary desk in your cabinetry. The work surface folds up to hide your mess. For a solution like this, place the desk at a height that will work with your counter stools or kitchen chairs, so you can just drag one over when it’s time to get to work.
2. Has places for corralling and charging electronics. One thing many of us didn’t have to consider during our last kitchen renovation was the personal devices that seem to need an endless supply of wires and juice. Phones, tablets, laptops and their wires can quickly take over your outlets and counters. Cooking and delicate electronic equipment are a terrible mix. Providing room above this desk keeps things out of the way in this kitchen.
Another lovely detail worth noting is the waterfall counter that extends across the desktop and down to the floor. This picks up on a similar detail on the kitchen island in the same room.
Locating outlets above the desk surface makes it easier to plug in everything you’ll need. If those outlets have built-in USB ports, you’ll eliminate the need to keep track of the charge boxes that contain plugs and USB ports.
Also, electricians can install outlets inside drawers, so you can keep your devices safely inside while they charge.
If your kitchen desk serves as your sole home office space, you won’t want printers, scanners and fax machines junking it up. An appliance garage is a good solution for keeping these things handy yet hidden.
The rolling door typically seen on appliance garages is called a tambour door and is readily available at home improvement stores.
3. Includes ample storage space. If you do a lot of paperwork at your kitchen desk, you’ll need good spots to tuck it away. If you’re a filer, file cabinets can be customized to fit seamlessly with your kitchen cabinets. If you’re a piler, baskets and shelves inside other cabinets can keep your piles organized.
4. Provides an organizational pit stop. If your kitchen desk area serves as your home’s command central, you’ll need to keep track of invitations, bills, business cards, appointments and more. A corkboard is a great place to pin it all until you have time to pay the bill, add an event to the calendar or create that new contact listing.
This kitchen desk has a bit of everything for communication: custom corkboard, chalkboard, dry-erase board and calendar.
5. Includes shelves for cookbooks. Kitchen desk areas are a great place to pick recipes and plan menus. Keeping cookbooks and recipes handy in the kitchen is something we’ve always done, but it usually involved letting them hog valuable counter space or shoving them willy-nilly in cabinets designed for china. Today’s designers know to size up a cookbook collection and plan shelves accordingly, and the desk area is just the right spot.
This extended kitchen desk incorporates plenty of space for cookbooks on the desktop, wall-mounted shelves and lower shelves.
6. Is well-lighted. Don’t count on your kitchen’s overhead lights for proper reading light. Here, undercabinet lighting keeps the desk space clear and illuminates the entire area.
If you have the space, a task lamp or table lamp can add an interesting layer of light to your kitchen. This is the light to leave on during movie night, so you can get a snack without having to flip on the overhead lights in your kitchen.
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