The Family Plan: Kitchen Design for Families with Children

Find out how to design a kitchen for your busy family. Incorporate these ideas to make your kitchen durable, safe, functional and beautiful for you and your children.

Especially for busy families with children, the kitchen is the nerve center of the house. You may have children of different ages with different needs: toddlers who are apt to run their tricycles into cabinets or touch the refrigerator with sticky hands, school age kids who prepare their own lunches or snacks and teenagers who may need to grab a quick meal before heading out to after school activities. And let’s not forget the parents, who want a durable, safe, beautiful and functional Family kitchen.

No matter what the ages of your kids now, your kitchen will need to last at least ten years, so keep that in mind. Here are some things to think about when designing your new kitchen.

Easy to maintain and clean

As any parent knows, keeping your home clean when you have children can be a challenge since being neat and clean is usually a low priority for kids, especially little ones. Make your life easier by using easy to clean surfaces like quartz countertops, which give you a similar look to granite but are less likely to stain. Laminate countertops are also easy to wipe down and have the advantage of being more budget friendly.

Consider cabinet door styles with a simple design so they can be easily wiped down when your 7 year old decides to bake a cake on her own.

Similarly, choose flooring that is easy to mop and tough to damage like porcelain tiles. Think carefully about using stainless steel appliances because they show fingerprints easily.

Good lines of visibility

An open floor plan will give you visibility into other areas of the house so you can keep an eye on kids while you’re in the kitchen. It also allows for easy conversation and traffic flow between rooms that can make your home feel bigger.

Eat-in area

With today’s fast-paced lifestyle and multiple people with their own schedules going if different directions, it can be helpful to have an additional, casual eating area that can double as a homework area.

You can add this to an island or peninsula or put a freestanding table in a breakfast nook or bay window.

Easy access to food

Rather than constantly having to get snacks for children, give them access to their own snacks. Pantries with pullout shelves put food within easy reach, as do designated snack drawers in lower cabinets.

Refrigerator drawers can also gives kids easy access to approved snack foods.

Get organized

Mornings go much easier when kids’ stuff is easy to grab, so think about how you can incorporate dedicated spaces for homework, hooks for backpacks and lunches into your new kitchen.

You can also set aside space for a family calendar where you can coordinate schedules, or a bulletin board or chalkboard for reminders. You can even use chalkboard paint to turn one of the surfaces of a pantry, cabinet or wall into a handy chalkboard.

Kid height counters

A trend in kitchen designs is to have a section of counter that is a lower height, which is perfect for little kitchen helpers. Add shorter barstools to eliminate falls when children climb into their seats to do homework.

Safety first

Choose ovens, stoves and cooktops with controls towards the back so they can’t be easily turned on by little hands. Consider using a magnetic strip for your knives on your backsplash so they are out of reach.

Talk to your kitchen professional about how to design your kitchen for your whole family to use and enjoy safely. Don’t have a kitchen professional? Upgrade to Plan Right™ free plan, and in addition to the enhanced budgeting tool and full access to our video tutorials and article library, we will connect you with up to three kitchen professionals in your area who have met or exceeded our strict qualifications. 

The Right Light: Kitchen Lighting Choices-

Discover the different types of lighting and how to layer them to get a well-lit and stylish kitchen.

Having the right lighting makes a huge difference in the style, functionality and ambiance of your kitchen plans. It can direct the eye to focal points like your island or a beautiful mosaic, light up prep areas and give your kitchen a cozy feel. You will get the best effect if you layer multiple types of lighting. Here is a guide to the different types of kitchen lighting and how to use them.

Ambient lighting–This is a soft light that fills the room and bounces off the ceiling and walls. It can come from pendant fixtures and sconces, especially ones with frosted shades, which diffuse the light, although large high hats also provide ambient light. Some homeowners add another level of brightness to their kitchens by installing cheap to operate LED over-cabinet lights. An additional source of beautiful ambient light is the natural light from windows and skylights.

This is the lighting that will make your kitchen feel warm and welcoming and is a baseline for your other lighting choices.

Task lighting – This lighting brightens up work areas like countertops where you prepare food, above the stove or sink or in a pantry. They are more focused and may include high hats with a narrower beam over your work areas, under counter LED strips and battery powered stick on lights inside pantries.

Decorative lighting – There are some lighting sources that are purely for decoration, not being a major source of light. This includes wall washers, back-lit mirrors and other stylish lamps and fixtures.

Accent lighting – The purpose of accent lighting is to add dramatic effect and highlight special decorative focal points. Track lights are the most common accent lighting, as they can be adjusted and pointed at your desired area.

Lighting Design Trends

Large pendants - In kitchens being designed now, we are seeing larger pendant fixtures over islands rather than multiple smaller pendants. Consider choosing one or two larger pendants to light your area. The pendants will create a lot of visual interest and can tie in the rest of your kitchen design together.

Interesting shapes – Try out a rectangular or drum-shaped lighting fixture instead of the usual oval fixture to add interest.

Toekick lights – Although you can’t really call toe kick lights task lighting, it does add a small amount of ambient light and serves as a nightlight so midnight snackers don’t stub their toes. You can even put these on a motion sensor so they go on when someone enters the kitchen.

Inside cabinet lighting – If you display art, crystal or fine china in glass front cabinets or open shelves, why not illuminate it? It will create another dimension of light in a line of sight that is rarely lit.

Talk to your kitchen professional about how to layer the right lighting in your kitchen for maximum beauty and function. Don’t have a kitchen professionals yet? Upgrade to Plan Right™ now and get connected with up to three kitchen professionals in your area who have met or exceeded our strict criteria. 

Understanding the Types of Kitchen Professionals

As you think about what you want your dream kitchen to look like and come closer to beginning your renovation project, you may be ready to start looking for a kitchen professional. What you may not know is that there is a variety of professionals who can help you with all or part of your kitchen remodeling, and you might end up using several of them simultaneously. Here is a guide to their roles.

Kitchen designer – A kitchen designer’s main role is to design both the layout of your kitchen and the look. Homeowners turn to kitchen designers to take their vision and turn it into a practical design that is functional, beautiful and within budget.

Certified kitchen designers specialize in residential kitchen remodeling and are experienced in doing it. They are knowledgeable about kitchen design as well as construction, mechanical, plumbing and electrical issues. They keep up to date on the newest materials and products and on your local building codes and other relevant regulations. Kitchen designers are trained in both functional and aesthetic issues and can help you come up with design solutions you may not have considered.

The services of a kitchen designer are not a large expense, comprising only 4-10% of the total renovation budget on average. In addition to designing the kitchen, they may recommend cabinet manufacturers, electricians and other contractors to handle the actual implementation of your project.

Contractor – A general contractor specializing in kitchens will generally focus more on the implementation than the design, which is a good solo option if you are keeping the same layout and just need to upgrade your kitchen elements like the cabinets, backsplash, countertops, etc.  You can also use a combination of kitchen designer and contractor to handle both design and implementation of your project.

A general contractor will source any needed specialists like tile installers and plumbers and will both manage and pay them, so you only need to deal with one point of contact. General contractors are knowledgeable about all types of construction and building codes and should be able to quickly come up with solutions in the event of an unexpected complication. If there is construction involved like installing a window ormoving a wall, they will be able to advise you if and how that can be done.

Design/Build firm – As the name implies, a design/build firm incorporates both designers and contractors into the same company, giving you all the capabilities of both. One advantage of using a design/build firm is that there should be plenty of communication between the designer and the construction side, which may eliminate misunderstandings or design ideas that are difficult to implement.

Cabinet manufacturer – Since every kitchen needs cabinets and cabinets are such a large part of the overall budget, some homeowners opt to deal directly with a cabinet manufacturer. Many of them provide some design services to homeowners in the hopes that they will win the cabinet manufacturing and installation business. They can also be used in conjunction with a kitchen designer and/or a contractor or with a design/build firm. If the cabinet manufacturer provides only standard sizes and styles, this will limit the possible design but if they have the ability to create custom cabinets, they may be able to creatively solve design, space or access problems.

Cabinet manufacturers typically will also be able to provide countertops made of the same material as their cabinets (usually laminate or wood), so you may have to find another professional to handle the countertops if you want other kinds of materials like granite or quartz. If dealing with a cabinet manufacturer, ask what type of countertop materials they provide.

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