Today’s modern kitchen serves as a family center for home entertainment and activities. Now they are open and well lit places. Kitchen size and design should address your family’s lifestyle and how your kitchen is used for cooking, dining and entertaining. Since the kitchen has to fulfill more functions than any other room in the house, it has also had to increase in size. Today’s kitchen design challenge is to create an open kitchen, one that is part of a dining room, family room, or so-called great room.

Both the function and the style of the modern kitchen play an important role when tackling a kitchen renovation or design project.
If you’re remodeling an existing kitchen or planning an additional kitchen or new home, here are some current kitchen design trends to keep in mind.

One of the most recent trends in modern kitchen design ideas is to make the kitchen part of a “great room”, that is, to combine the kitchen with an adjacent family room. To create the great room, the wall separating the kitchen and family room or dining room is completely removed, creating a more open space centered around a spacious kitchen island or peninsula.

There are some definite advantages to extending the kitchen. You can open up the space, and by doing so, you make both the kitchen and the other room look and feel more spacious. Plus, since kitchen cabinets, countertops, and appliances are beautiful pieces of furniture in their own right, now you can show off your new kitchen. Your remodel costs won’t actually increase much by opening up the kitchen, aside from the cost of the extra cabinets. Regardless, the additional cost that would be put into this type of kitchen design would be more than offset by the increase in value of your home.

Furniture-style cabinets will continue to be a popular trend in kitchen design, at least according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA). These furniture-style cabinets are considered especially popular in kitchen island development. Features that give cabinets a furniture-like appearance are legs or feet, corbal inlays, and moldings. Cabinet doors are made from solid hardwoods, with maple and cherry being the most popular. When it comes to finishes, light and medium finishes continue to be popular, although kitchen designers and trend watchers are also seeing a growing interest in deep, rich browns, influenced somewhat by the furniture industry and to create a more formal look for the kitchen.

Cabinet makers and kitchen designers are beginning to design more individual, free-standing cabinets instead of the usual built-in cabinets for expanded “great room” kitchens. This is known as the ‘unfitted’ kitchen design, first popularized by English designers and cabinetmakers. This also leads to another trend of incorporating traditional quality furniture features such as glazed, distressed and antique finishes.

Undermount sinks in both cast iron and stainless steel are among the recent changes in kitchen design because homeowners like the clean, smooth look that goes with modern designs. The advantages of an undermount sink are that it is functional, beautiful and very easy to install. The container is attached under a countertop. There is no visible edge of the sink above the counter and there is no lip to collect water and trap dirt and crumbs. Instead, debris is easily washed into the sink so the counter can be cleaned faster.

Other recent trends in modern kitchen design include:

Countertops: Natural stone remains the most popular countertop material, with granite being the most popular. Limestone is another popular option. It is increasingly common to mix different materials, using stone for some countertops, butcher block or concrete for others.

Appliances – Commercial-grade appliances are becoming popular, particularly kitchens, such as built-in refrigerators and European-style dishwashers. Warming drawers and convection microwave ovens that double as a second oven are also popular.

Put pots and pans in the drawers. With heavy-duty drawer slides, large, heavy pots can now be placed in drawers instead of cabinets.

The thickness of the cabinet door is likely to be 1 inch instead of 3/4 inch, as this size is considered more of a higher quality.

Antique, aged and glazed finishes are increasingly being used to replace the traditional ornate details once found on many high-end cabinets.

Painted finishes now include colors like cranberry, white, off-white, and oyster.

According to kitchen designers, as today’s kitchen grows in size and complexity, “mixed orders” are becoming more common. Kitchen islands, wet bars, baking centers, and butlers’ pantries are being incorporated into more and more kitchen designs, creating a need for more contrasts in cabinet styles, colors, wood types, and finished.