Making the kitchen the heart of the home

Is there any room of the house that can compete with the kitchen in terms of both prominence and importance? When you think about it, it's a place for not only the expected cooking, but also random socialising between family members and friends. It's a place where kids may play, and you may even have informal meals there or use it as a makeshift home office. With all of this in mind, it therefore really pays to have a kitchen that befits such a lofty status... a Magnet kitchen design, in other words!

It's easy to find yourself watching the TV programmes of certain celebrity chefs and convincing yourself that you need a huge oven or fridge big enough for the entire family to sit in. But in truth, every person's kitchen needs differ. Whilst some of the aforementioned features may be perfectly good for the avid cook, they aren't of much use if there isn't also plenty of worktop space and the entire layout doesn't work well from a practical point of view.

When you are considering the design of your kitchen, you'll want to think about how best to fill the available space, as well as whether such a space is very suitable for a kitchen at all. A lot of wide open space may seem luxurious on paper, but it also means that the people in it will be further apart from each other, which doesn't make for easy socialising. And of course, you'll also need to consider where exactly certain appliances and surface areas are to be placed, as you don't want to find yourself frequently running from one far end of the kitchen to the other, just to carry out basic tasks.

For your kitchen to feel like the true heart of your home, it'll need to be a pleasant place to be, and one key determinant of that is the materials that are used. As well as considering certain materials individually, you'll need to envisage the relationship that they'll have with each other. Glass, wood, marble and stone can all be incorporated into the perfect kitchen, and the right combination of matt and shiny surfaces can make for a truly dynamic and interesting visual space.

Similarly, lighting plays a big part in how much time you want to spend in your kitchen. It can make your kitchen look almost exotic, but take your time to consider how it can be flexible enough to cater for the many different activities that take place in your kitchen, the true heart of the home.