Kitchen Furniture
People who are fitting a new kitchen often overlook the importance of kitchen furniture - probably because the table, chairs and barstools we have in our kitchens are among the most taken-for-granted piece of furniture in the entire house. We use them so much that we barely think about them most of the time.
However, installing a brand new kitchen and suddenly discovering that your existing kitchen furniture is a complete clash can be a nasty shock. So it’s a good idea to make sure that everything matches before you make a major investment.
As far as possible, you should be able to clean all kitchen furniture with a damp cloth. So wood and plastic are ideal surfaces for stools and chairs, though don’t write off leather - it’s hygienic, easy to maintain and it can provide an interestingly ‘different’ look in parts of your kitchen that need it.
A really popular option for modern kitchens is a breakfast bar. These days kitchens are used for far more than just cooking - many modern houses are designed with the expectation that most if not all family dining will take place in the kitchen, and many new houses are designed without dining rooms altogether. Breakfast bars not only look stylish, they can be very easy to install. The simplest designs consist of a single worktop, usually made of wood or laminated board, that you cut to an appropriate length, and a pair of metal legs. One end of the worktop is securely attached to a wall and the legs are attached to the bottom of the other end. The legs should be designed to telescope on a screw thread so that their height can be adjusted easily and small variations in the evenness of the floor taken into account. The legs don’t necessarily require attachment to the floor, though if your breakfast bar has the sort that simply stand on rubber bases you must be careful not to kick them or trip over them - if you live in a home with lots of boisterous kids a more robust design might be in order.
Breakfast bars can usually be bought with matching stools. This should be of a firm, rigid design that can stand up to some mistreatment and overuse. You should also check that the rubber or plastic footings at the base of the legs doesn’t slip on your kitchen floor.
Kitchen tables are a more traditional alternative to a breakfast bar. You don’t need a huge kitchen/diner to accommodate a table. If your kitchen is small, a good drop-leaf design could work very well. When folded away, drop-leaf tables can be used as temporary storage for recipe books, school bags or other odds and ends of daily life. Fully opened out, it should be large enough to seat a family of four. Drop-leafs are less suitable for large families and they tend to be inconvenient for formal dining. One of the big problems of drop-leaf tables is the complexity of their legs. Rather than having just four legs, most have a complex arrangement of folding gate supports. lt’s pretty easy to stub your toe on these, and an unthinking child stretching out his or her legs can cause a partial collapse.
If you are interested in buying a drop-leaf table, you’ll probably have to buy in ready constructed - they are quite complex pieces of joinery and need to be sturdily made to compensate for the inherent instability of the design. A flatpack drop-leaf, if you can find one, is likely to be very delicate.
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