Kitchen design and trend update

In today¹s economic climate, design is becoming more and more important.

Suddenly, it¹s no longer about selling your house and playing the property market it¹s much more about making it a home again. There is a real need, a real hunger, for people to have more personalised, more individualised products

The British kitchen is a very hard working space and can get quite a bit of bashing a lot of the time. It also tends to be quite cluttered, but this is very easy to solve with organised and well-managed storage solutions. Traditionally, kitchen design can be too mechanical, when in fact the kitchen also needs to be about entertaining, about eating, about socialising – ultimately, it should be about conversation. It needs to be flexible enough to accommodate a whole variety of different functions but it also has to be comfortable to spend time in.
 
For me, one of the big things to consider is lighting. Obviously you need to have very specific lighting in a kitchen, but I also think that you need to have soft ambient lighting as well. One thing I suggest to people – and I do this in my own home too - is to place table lamps on work surfaces so that it feels as if the kitchen is being used as furniture rather than the other way around.

The first range I’ve styled for Moben is Ellipse (above), which has a great fluidity to it and is an incredibly social space. The whiplash island unit means it’s a very interesting, design-orientated space, but it’s actually a very logical kitchen. The horseshoe unit is a great way of maximising both working and social space, but without taking up too much room. It’s also very fresh in that it takes a step towards more furniture-like work surfaces in the kitchen - a move away from very German-style solutions that have been around for a long time. For kitchens, it is about moving way from pure function and having more fun with your design.
 
One of the biggest trends to emerge in kitchen design is the use of colour, which is becoming much more seductive.

Rich coloured paint is definitely very popular at the moment and has been for a long time, but this can be anything from peacock or navy through to purple, coral or raspberry. There is a massive spectrum of shades out there, something for everyone to experiment with. It’s very much a question of psychology, of wanting something more fantastical than they did a few years ago when design used to feel quite understated.
 
I also think that white is an incredibly important colour, which is why I was so keen to embrace it in the Ellipse range for Moben. What I don’t like is colour or design that tries to have no taste, like when a room is beige or just hasn’t been properly thought out. White is actually a very confrontational colour. There’s nothing compromised about it. It has that link with modernity. Until the 1920s it was very difficult to achieve as a paint colour. Before then there wasn’t white in a way that we would understand it, pure white was almost completely impossible.
 
In Ellipse, the choice of white gloss units is a good way of focusing more attention on the design itself and letting you stamp personality on the decor and accessories, which of course can be changed as trends come and go. It is about the shape of the units, which is very important and I think that the high gloss is key too. It gives it a sense of style, and gives impact that you wouldn’t get in a more matt finish.
 
I live by my own statements – I have wallpaper in the kitchen, which is relatively new, there’s art on the walls rather than units. There’s no hiding the modernity of the machinery in a kitchen. All the lines are very clean but it is teamed with very romantic finishes.
 
That’s why I want to see kitchens that feel more like living spaces. We spend so much time as a family in the kitchen, so we should think beyond just function and start to mix things up a bit.