Kitchen
You can put light where you want it Resist the temptation to deliver an even coverage of light across all your space: if you light everything evenly, you’ll end up highlighting nothing. Also, this is your home, not an office with regulatory lighting demands! So have some fun with it, and plan for how you’re going to use the space and what you need the light for.
Taking their cue from the homeowners’ edgy yet quirky personal effects, the team from Vievva Designers proposed a well-planned renovation that would be urban in style with touches of industrial elements. Although they didn’t deviate too much from the Build-to-Order (BTO) flat’s layout, the designers hacked away some walls to create an open-plan feel, joining the kitchen to the dining area, and visually including the study to the common spaces by replacing its walls with framed glass panels. Houzz at a GlanceWho lives here: A thirtysomething married couple – he’s an entrepreneur, she’s a banker Location: 4-room HDB BTO flat in PunggolSize: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (approx. 110 square metres)
Style up the sink Again, sink details show buyers you’re on-trend. These days under-mounting sinks is almost standard and they work well in stone tops at both the expensive and cheaper ends of the market. Try a big single sink, or double sink with a 10 millimetre internal radius and you have a great-looking sink that’s easy to clean.
Handleless look with extruded handles. Clean up the lines One of the best tricks for a high-impact kitchen that gives you big returns on your money is to aim for less fuss – a clean line of drawers, rather than a mix of cupboards and drawers, for example. People love this look and it means you can spend more money on good countertops. For big savings, keep island units to a maximum 3 metres long and 800-900 millimetres wide, to get the best yield out of the raw stone material (you can get both the back wall and island in one top).
Metamorphic SaveEmail Rethink old materials The most common kitchen material, low-pressure laminate, has changed radically over the past few years. Remember the fake-timber look? Well these days, some of the low-pressure laminate is so real looking that most buyers don’t know the difference. This is good news for controlling the budget and, with less focus on cabinet fronts, low-pressure laminate (Melteca) and new materials such as Ultraglaze acrylics are fine. Today, both of these materials are delivered to the kitchen manufacturer in a pre-finished state, ready for cutting and edging – a quick and simple process that’s cost effective. Melteca costs less than Ultraglaze-type products, but Ultraglaze is still very affordable.
Countertops are big newsNow that we are spending less on cabinet fronts, we can spend more on countertops. There have been big shifts over the past few years towards stone countertops, and as demand has increased, prices have come down. You can still spend a fortune on countertops if you want to (building them up to 50-60 millimetres deep, for example), but the large selection of self-supporting 20-millimetre-deep stone countertops on the market now provides a huge choice at very good prices. This is deep enough to allow you to still do all the cool things like under-mounting sinks, adding waterfall ends and island overhangs for seating, but now at less cost.
You can put light where you want it Resist the temptation to deliver an even coverage of light across all your space: if you light everything evenly, you’ll end up highlighting nothing. Also, this is your home, not an office with regulatory lighting demands! So have some fun with it, and plan for how you’re going to use the space and what you need the light for.
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