Finding the Right Kitchen Design

Free Kitchen Design Services
At some home centers general contractors and cabinet dealers offer free design services. While getting something for free is always attractive, free design services are likely to be cursory. Typically, these quickie designers make little effort to learn your priorities.

Because people now expect to use their kitchens for many different purposes, it is common to encounter conflicts among the various roles. For example, the smooth, easy-to-clean surfaces in a kitchen can seem cold. What can you do to warm up the space and make it more comfortable for entertaining, without making it impossible to clean?

Such design services do offer a low-cost way to get the ball rolling. In the idea-gathering phase at the beginning of your planning process, you can talk to more than one of these designers to get some idea about how things might fit together. With a very simple, low-budget job, this cursory design may be adequate, but for most jobs, you'd do better ultimately to engage the expertise of someone who's going to take the time to design the job to fit your needs.

Kitchen Design Software
There are now dozens of software packages to help you design a kitchen. Some take weeks of study and are primarily designed for professionals.

Others allow a novice to start playing around with different design ideas in under an hour. By eliminating the need for manually preparing drawings, the programs make it much easier to try out and visualize a wide array of ideas.

Many programs are equipped with built-in design advice that can suggest placement of appliances or catch obvious design mistakes.

While useful, powerful and fun, these programs cannot yet match the work of trained professionals. These products are especially ill-equipped to help you understand the opportunities and obstacles inherent in the way your kitchen is now laid out. Figuring out the location of existing ducts, pipes, wires, chimneys and load-bearing walls is something only a professional, working on-site, is likely to be able to accomplish.

Kitchen Architects
The most traditional design approach involves hiring an architect to help you sift through your ideas and help you convert your needs into a detailed plan. The advantages of this approach are that the architect provides a comprehensive service and is highly trained in design.

Many architects won't work on jobs as small as a single residential kitchen. In some cases, architects are an option only if you are doing the kitchen remodeling as part of a larger project, such as a major addition or renovation.

However, some architects are now offering a la carte services, where they provide less comprehensive service for smaller jobs. Some will even work on an hourly basis.

Cost can be one disadvantage of working with architects. It is often the most expensive option. However, if you can achieve a superior design, it may well be worth the investment.

For best results, make sure the architect specializes in kitchen design. Kitchens require a unique set of skills and knowledge.

Kitchen Dealer-Designers and Remodelers
Sometimes, it's hard to tell a dealer-designer from a remodeling contractor. After all, both will create a new kitchen for you. But, the distinction is important and there is a simple way to tell them apart. Listen to how they describe the people who actually build the kitchen. Remodelers will refer to contractors, carpenters or builders. Dealer-designers tend to refer to installers.

The advantages and disadvantages of each type of business flow directly from the perspective implied in this simple language difference. They simply have a very different focus. Designer-dealers concentrate more on product while remodelers direct their attention to construction.

Typically, dealer-designers know a lot about the products that go into a kitchen. They know much more than the typical remodeler about such things as cabinet styles, countertop options, decorative trim, special lighting effects and special pullout racks. This makes sense because these people are designers and product salespeople rolled into one.

Dealer-designers make most of their money from the sale of cabinets, appliances and other kitchen components. As a result, some of them offer their services for free or at discounted prices. Remodelers tend to make their money from the construction phase but may also offer free or discounted design services.

Kitchen Design/Build Firms
Finally, there is the design/build alternative. The concept behind this relatively new approach is to integrate the design and construction processes in a hybrid that captures most of the strengths and avoids most of the weaknesses in some of the options described above.

This approach can often result in a less expensive design that is much more practical. Just as important is that when one firm handles all the design and construction that firm is fully accountable for the entire project. This means problems can be addressed directly without a lot of time and energy wasted on blaming people.

Another advantage of the design/build approach is that those involved in building and those involved in designing work together continuously, with each helping the other to adapt their practices to produce a quality product at a reasonable price. These advantages have made the design/build approach extremely popular in recent years.

For best results when considering a design/build firm, ask lots of questions about both its design and construction expertise and find out exactly how the two are integrated to see if the approach makes sense for your project.