Whether you use it for heating something up in the microwave, you’re a baking fan who loves to spend hours watching cakes rise, or it is the beating heart of your household, the kitchen is one of the most important rooms.

Depending on your specific needs, your ideal kitchen will be designed with different functions in mind, but regardless of this, if you look back over the years, there are obvious trends in kitchen and kitchen cabinet design.

Clean, Stylish and Functional

Not much to ask, but these are the requirements of almost every homeowner with regard to their kitchen. So let’s have a look closer at what people want in their kitchen cabinet design.

Cabinet Colour – Current trends are showing that people prefer to get back to nature and use ‘earthy’ colours such as light browns, greens, greys and off-whites. While we still want kitchens to look clean and hygienic, people prefer colours that don’t show up every speck of dirt. A natural-coloured kitchen can bring a sense of calm and extra colour can be added if homeowners prefer.

Horizontal Orientation – Storage is the key in today’s kitchen, and large, horizontally orientated cabinets are the perfect solution to storage. You can hide pans, microwaves, rubbish bins, ironing boards, whatever you have inside large cabinets, without them having to reach right up to the ceiling, making them much more functional than the more traditional piled high cabinets.

Simple – Every home refurbishment has one eye on re-selling, and this is why homeowners prefer to keep lines simple. Simple lines create a continual flow between parts of a room, and if desired, different rooms. By keeping cabinets, doors and knobs simple, you get more flexibility and longer-lasting cabinets.

Rustic Kitchens – There is still a strong lean towards a rustic style kitchen. Distressing work and the use of stone are perfect examples of this. Possibly due to a backlash in the amount of technology in our lives, we are finding that people are continually looking for more rustic and natural kitchens.

Functional – Despite the desire for simple and more rustic cabinet design, this can’t be at the expense of functionality. You still will want somewhere to put your food blender, dishwasher and maybe have a cell phone charging station or door which opens onto a flat-screen TV.

It is the job of a kitchen designer to ensure that a kitchen cabinet works both in style and taste, and functionality. We are finding that people are looking more for a cabinet, which is simple and rustic looking, yet carries all the functions of a more high tech model.