Kitchen Design: Layouts, Islands and Ideas

In short: Good kitchen design is decided by measurements before it is decided by taste: the width of the room, the gaps between runs, and where the water, waste, power and extraction can go. A galley needs 1,200mm between runs and an island needs 1,000mm of clearance all round, so a room under about 3,600mm wide is usually better with a peninsula. Once the layout works, the ideas that make a kitchen good to live with are mostly about storage, appliance placement and a splashback that suits the hob.

01 How do you design a kitchen?

You design a kitchen in six steps, in this order: how you use it, the measurements, the services, the layout, the storage and appliances, and only then the doors, worktops and colours. Most disappointing kitchens were designed the other way round, starting from a door colour in a brochure.

1. How you use it. Who cooks, how often, whether you eat in the room, and whether two people are ever at the worktop at once.
2. Measure the room, including the window sill height, the ceiling, and every door opening into it.
3. Find the services: the soil stack and waste route, the gas meter if there is one, the consumer unit and where an extractor can be ducted outside.
4. Choose the layout that the width allows — the clearances below decide this, not preference.
5. Place the appliances and plan the storage around them.
6. Choose finishes last: doors, handles, worktop, splashback, flooring and lighting.

We do not have a showroom. Design happens at the home visit, in the room itself, with the tape measure out — and if you have bought, or are buying, a kitchen from a supplier, we check their plan against the room before you place the order.

02 Which kitchen layout fits which room?

The minimum widths above are hard floors, not preferences. They come from the depth of a base unit — 600mm, or 650mm once the door and handle are on — plus the walking and door-opening space between.

03 What clearances does a kitchen need?

If you remember nothing else from this guide, remember these six numbers. They are the difference between a kitchen that works and one that annoys you every day for fifteen years.

The one people regret most is the island clearance. At 900mm two people cannot pass, and a dishwasher door opened across the gap blocks the route entirely. If you cannot achieve 1,000mm on every side, a peninsula will serve you better than a cramped island — and it costs less, because the services stay at the wall.

04 Is the work triangle still relevant?

The work triangle — the idea that the sink, hob and fridge should form a triangle with sides between 1,200mm and 2,700mm — dates from 1940s research into single-cook kitchens, and it is still a useful sanity check rather than a rule. If your sink and hob end up nine metres apart, the triangle has told you something true.

What has replaced it in practice is zoning: grouping the kitchen by what happens where, rather than by three appliances. A modern kitchen usually has a prep zone (sink, bin, chopping space), a cooking zone (hob, oven, landing space either side), a storage zone (fridge, larder) and often a serving or drinks zone away from the cooking. Two people can work in a zoned kitchen at once, which a triangle never accounted for.

05 Which layout should you choose for your room?

1. A room under 2,400mm wide — single run, and put the tall units at one end. Do not attempt a galley; you will not be able to open the oven.
2. A long narrow room with a door at each end — galley, but be honest about the traffic. If the route to the garden runs through it, the far run should be storage rather than the hob.
3. A squarish room of 3m × 3m — L-shaped, with the hob and sink on different legs. This is the layout most UK kitchens should be and the one that goes wrong least.
4. A dedicated kitchen at least 2,900mm wide, where you cook seriously — U-shaped. It gives the most worktop per square metre of any layout and puts everything within a step.
5. An open-plan kitchen-diner at least 3,600mm wide — island, provided you can get power, water and waste to the middle of the floor. In a solid concrete floor, price that up before committing to it.
6. A room between 3,000mm and 3,600mm that wants to feel open — peninsula. It gives you the seating and the sightline of an island without the clearance requirement or the service runs.

06 What makes a good kitchen island?

A good kitchen island is at least 1,000mm clear of the runs around it on every side, deep enough to be useful from both faces, and planned with its power, water and waste before the floor is finished. A standard island is two rows of 600mm base units back to back or a single row with a seating overhang; the seating side needs around 250 to 300mm of worktop overhang for knees, and roughly 600mm of width per stool.

Decide early whether the island is a prep surface, a sink, a hob or somewhere to sit, because each brings different services into the middle of the room. A hob on an island needs ceiling extraction or a downdraft unit; a sink needs a waste with enough fall to reach the drain. We build islands as part of the kitchen, including frames and end panels made to measure where standard units will not fit.

07 Which splashback should you choose?

The best splashback is the one that suits what is behind it: heat-resistant behind the hob, wipe-clean behind the sink, and easy to replace everywhere else. We fit all of the common types, and the choice usually comes down to budget, the worktop, and whether you want grout lines.

• Tiles — the most flexible and the easiest to repair. Ceramic or porcelain behind a hob is fine; a small-format or patterned tile gives the most character for the money.
• Glass — one sheet, no grout, made to measure after the worktops are fitted. Toughened glass is needed behind a hob.
• Quartz or stone upstand or full-height splashback — cut from the same slab as the worktop, which looks seamless and adds to the templating wait.
• Laminate or compact panels — the cheapest seamless option, matched to a laminate worktop.

08 Where should the appliances go?

Put the dishwasher next to the sink, the hob with worktop either side of it, and the fridge at the end of a run so it can be reached without walking through the cooking area. Those three decisions do more for how a kitchen works than anything else on the plan. Integrated appliances sit behind doors that match the units, so they need the right housing sizes from the start; a built-in oven at eye level in a tall unit saves bending and frees the space under the hob for drawers.

Extraction is part of the design, not an accessory. Approved Document F sets a minimum intermittent extract rate of 30 litres per second for a cooker hood in a kitchen, and a hood ducted outside meets it far more convincingly than a recirculating one. Plan the duct route before the units go up.

09 How do you get more storage in a kitchen?

• Swap base cupboards for deep pan drawers. You see everything from above and nothing is lost at the back.
• Replace a run of wall units with a floor-to-ceiling larder or pull-out pantry. In most kitchens this adds more usable storage than any layout change.
• Take wall units to the ceiling, or finish them with cornice, so there is no dust shelf on top.
• Use the corners properly — a carousel, a pull-out, or a blind corner left for things you rarely need.
• Put plinth drawers under the base units for trays and baking sheets.
• Move the washing machine and tumble dryer to a utility room if the house has one, which frees a whole base unit width.

10 Which kitchen design ideas actually work?

The kitchen design ideas that work are the ones that solve a problem in the room you have, not the ones that photograph well in somebody else's. These are the ones we see pay off most often in the houses we work in.

• In a narrow galley, handleless doors and a single colour along both runs make the room read wider.
• In a 1930s semi, knocking through to the dining room gives space for an island or peninsula — and makes it a structural job with building control involved.
• Under-cabinet lighting along every prep run, on its own switch. It is cheap during the fit and awkward afterwards.
• A tall bank of units at one end — fridge, oven, larder — keeps the rest of the room open with worktop at one height.
• A breakfast bar on a peninsula where the room is too narrow for an island.
• Bespoke joinery for the awkward bits: a chimney breast alcove, a sloping ceiling, a gap a catalogue unit will not fill.

11 What to sort out before the layout is fixed

• Where the soil stack and drainage are. Moving a sink means moving waste, and waste needs a fall — this constrains layouts more than anything else in the room.
• Whether the hob is gas or induction. Induction frees the layout considerably and removes the need for a gas run to an island.
• Where the extraction can go. An extractor over an island either needs ducting through the ceiling or is a recirculating unit, which is much less effective. Decide before the ceiling is closed up.
• Which way every door opens — the room door, the appliance doors, and the back door. Draw them all open on the plan at once. This is where clearances are lost.
• Where the window is. A sink under a window is a preference, not a rule, and forcing it can cost you a better layout.
• Whether a wall is structural. A layout that depends on removing a wall is a different project with a different budget and a building control application.