Embracing Minimalism with Concealed Appliances
If you’re renovating your kitchen and like the look of a uniform, minimalist style, a good design choice is concealing your appliances within custom kitchen joinery. Appliances such as your refrigerator, dishwasher and even microwave can be integrated with custom kitchen cabinet doors to give a seamless look in the kitchen. Keep reading to learn more about how to conceal your whitegoods.
Custom-built cabinetry
Most appliance manufacturers will now have whitegood options that are compatible with your custom cabinet doors. This means they come with unfinished doors and mounting capabilities, so your refrigerator, for example, can have a matching door to the rest of your kitchen cabinets, creating a streamlined, uniform aesthetic.
Integrated refrigerators sit flush within the rest of your custom cabinetry and at the same depth as the counters, and will often appear from the outset as a wall of cupboards.
Custom cabinet doors can also be made for dishwashers and dish drawers. Integrated dishwashers, unlike their freestanding counterparts, usually come in at a higher price point and are built into your cabinetry, beneath the benchtop, meaning they remain a relatively permanent fixture in your kitchen and can’t come with you if you move.
When choosing your new dishwasher, the most important consideration to make is in its size. Whether or not you install the new dishwasher in the same space as your pre-existing one will depend on the scale of your kitchen renovation. If you’re completely refurbishing your kitchen cabinetry, you will have a bit more leeway with the size you choose.
Remember there are two types of dishwasher to choose from: semi-integrated and fully integrated. Semi-integrated models will leave the control panel on display. Fully integrated models are finished to sit flush within your cabinetry and the control panel sits inside the top of the door, meaning you only know there’s a dishwasher when it’s open.
Speak to your kitchen designer about how you can make concealed appliances work in your kitchen. You’ll need to have a good idea from the beginning about which appliances you’ll be purchasing and where you’ll place them in order to have the cabinetry made to measure.
Conceal within your island
An alternative is to install your appliances out of sight. The easiest way to do this is to install the appliance, whether it be your dishwasher, oven or microwave, within your island bench. This will work if you have an open plan galley style kitchen that faces out onto a living area.
There are a number of advantages to having appliances concealed within your island bench. Installing your oven within the kitchen island frees up space on the opposite wall for the sink, leaving the top of your island relatively blank, with more room for food preparation.
This placement does, however, introduce difficulty in regards to rangehood placement. Some open kitchens have statement rangehoods that hang over the island, whilst other high-tech spaces have concealed rangehoods that emerge from within the island at the touch of a button.
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Want to learn more about how you can create a seamless aesthetic in your new kitchen? Speak to an experienced Apollo Kitchens team member today.
