Is The Kitchen Important? Why Custom Cabinets?

Why Is The Kitchen So Important?

Kitchens in older homes were generally uninspiring places, shut off from the rest of the house to keep the business of cooking under wraps. Designed to be useful and practical, kitchens of yesteryear certainly weren’t the social hub of the home as they are today.

But why, in recent years in particular, has the kitchen become king? As kitchen cabinet makers we’ve seen our fair share of Melbourne kitchens and we have a few theories we’d like to share….

Masterchef Causes Food Revival

In the 90s as our lifestyles became faster paced, people tended to gravitate towards the kitchen because that’s where you could quickly heat up a microwave meal or have a catch up with a family member before one or both of you rushed out the door. Today, the pace of life hasn’t slowed but people are more concerned with nutrition and taste. They want to eat more healthy and delicious meals than pot noodles and microwave dinners.

With reality TV shows such as MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules encouraging people to get back into the kitchen and cook up a storm, there’s been a big food revival in Australia. Men are also avidly watching these cooking shows and playing more of a part in regularly dishing up delicious family meals. The kitchen is no longer the woman’s domain, how times have changed!

Socialising As You Cook

The idea of the kitchen as a place to socialise increased in popularity, so people with smaller kitchens in older homes started to renovate and enlarge their kitchen space to follow the open plan trend. An open plan kitchen allowed the rest of the family to interact with the cook and gave a place where guests could gather and chat over a glass of wine. It also encouraged more interest in the meal, people offered to help chop, stir or prepare garnishes etc. making cooking more of a joint affair.

Bespoke custom kitchens became very popular as it meant you could change the layout and add elements like an island bench to allow the cook to look out on the rest of the room when making a meal rather than face a wall. New builds today put much more thought into the layout of the kitchen as a living space to incorporate this need to socialise and cook.

A generation ago the cook was shut away in another room slaving over a hot stove – now they’re chatting with family members, sharing the news of the day, having their experimental recipes taste-tested, helping the kids do their homework, surfing the net and more!

Family Health & Happiness

Investing in a beautiful kitchen today also means thinking about the health and happiness of your family, especially if you have little ones. Making meals, sharing recipes, and teaching cooking skills to children is very much a lifestyle and tradition for many families. We bet you can still remember helping your mum make cookies or licking out the bowl when you were a child.

The kitchen is a safe teaching environment, a place where children learn good social skills that help them make lifelong connections with others. Interestly, studies have also shown that children who eat home cooked meals with their families on a regular basis are more likely to do better in school than those who don’t, and less likely to to use alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes in later life.

Why Your Kitchen Deserves TLC

Since the kitchen has become the no.1 room in the house, planning the design of the kitchen is justifiably one of the most important considerations in a renovation or build. It has to be an inviting space where people want to spend the majority of their time. Getting it wrong can throw off the whole flow of a house and end up costing you a lot more in the long run to put it right. As any realtor will tell you, a bad kitchen can also hurt the resale value of your home.

With this in mind it’s definitely worth spending more to get the experts involved to design and build the best kitchen possible for your family. Even if you don’t want to knock down a wall, remodelling with a custom kitchen, including custom built cabinets and specially selected colours and layout can turn an undesirable kitchen into the heart and soul of the home.

Exact Cabinet Makers are expert residential and commercial kitchen cabinet makers based in East Melbourne. We can provide just about any custom cabinetry for kitchens, as well as bespoke items for storage. Contact us for advice or a quote or pop into our Kilsyth showroom, we’re always happy to have a chat.

Steve

About Steve

Founder of Exact Cabinet Makers, Steve Craig, began his cabinet making apprenticeship in Melbourne, working with one of Melbourne’s most respected craftsman.

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