A lot of prospective customers look for ideas or examples of what their new kitchen could look like online. Searching via Google provides images and information on kitchen trends, unique design ideas, state of the art technology as well as showing colour schemes and styles. Social media has also changed the way our customers find and research their new kitchen; Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and various other social media platforms are used and shared amount groups of friends or colleagues.
Often we find there are two types of people; those who know what they want, and those who don’t. For those who know what they want, online research probably begun months ago and by the time they reach us, normally via recommendation, they’re reading to give us a detailed brief and some images to show how they would like the finished kitchen to look. Other customers are fed up with the look or feel of their kitchen, and they come to us from ‘scratch’ wanting an idea of pricing or design concepts – this is also fine (and does give us some creative freedom, which most kitchen designers of course love!). For those customers, we often start by completing our kitchen brief document; a few simple yet effective questions designed to really understand the needs of our customer; why do they want a new kitchen? Where do they spend most of their time when in the kitchen? What appliances or areas are important to them? What do they hate or dislike about their current kitchen? With these type of questions we can start to understand why the customer is buying a new kitchen, and begin to tailor our design to suit their needs and desires.
The design comes next; we’ll ask you for dimensions or send one of our engineers to take measurements so we can plan the room and complete a design. This will be based on the initial questions we asked so we can incorporate the right items in the right places.
The final step, believe it or not, is the colour scheme and style of the kitchen itself. This is easily changed right up to the point of ordering. We’ll often have an idea about the style of the kitchen during the brief and some of the words our customers use are modern, sheek, minimalist, classic and vintage to describe the type of look or feel that they are trying to achieve. From here, we can gauge the type of door style that will help to create this look.
Traditional, classic and shaker are all words used to description the following types of doors which will help create a lasting traditional feel.
These shaker styles come in a variety of options; here is some examples:
Left: Solid wood door painted ivory
Right: Vinyl Wrapped Door finished in Oak effect
More and more of our customers now ask us for modern and or minimalist looks; which often means gloss or handleless kitchen doors. White Handleless Gloss kitchens are so popular right now; and we have 4 different doors, suitable for all types of budgets; the cheapest handleless white door will be a vinyl wrapped door whereas the more expensive offerings are lacquered doors.
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Left: White Handless Gloss Door
Right: Red Gloss Slab Door
We’ll soon be releasing our top 10 tips and gadgets to include when designing your new kitchen… subscribe to our email list to receive this next week!