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Pantry Ideas That Will Make Your Storage A Breeze

Your pantry is an essential piece of your kitchen puzzle, and for a few good reasons. Not only does it provide storage for your food, serving ware and cooking utensils, but an effective pantry can be a stunning design centrepiece too.

Although most of the time a pantry’s contents are hidden behind closed doors – meaning clutter won’t spoil the design of your room – the actual design of your pantry could be make or break in terms of how organised and efficient you are when cooking and entertaining.

Size and Capacity 

Think about how much you want to store in the pantry, and how much you can afford to spread in different cupboards, drawers and buffets around the kitchen and dining area.

• A cramped pantry could make it difficult to stay organised and find ingredients.
• One that’s too large might mean you lose ingredients to its deep, dark depths – never to be seen again.

If you want everything in the one place, a butlers’ pantry might be the way to go. Also known as a walk-in, a butler’s pantry gives you spacious shelves and clever storage space so you can keep bulky appliances, excess serving ware, and your overflowing cookbook library off your kitchen counters.

Some people choose to store their kitchenware and food in different places around the kitchen, so don’t need a very big pantry. Using a few different cupboards for storage means you’ll have things in easy reach when you need them, such as pots and pans, and herbs and spices near the stove. In this case, your pantry could be used to store only certain items.

Design and decor

As we mentioned before, the inside of the pantry likely won’t win any design awards; your ingredients won’t be on display. That said, the outside of the pantry – and its doors – could make all the difference as to what effect the pantry has on the room as a whole.

As a blanket rule, you should choose pantry doors that match your kitchen’s overall design scheme, and the pantry should match the other cupboards in the room.

You can also choose between exposed, concealed or integrated pantry designs.

• Choose a concealed pantry when you want to seamlessly build your storage into your kitchen, where each cupboard is almost hidden away until you choose to open it. You can build extra work spaces or nooks into your pantries to give you more bench space that you can hide away behind closed doors when you’re not using it.
• An exposed pantry puts everything in plain sight. Your ingredients and serving ware will be on display for all to see, which means you can play around with glass jars and attractive containers.

 

You could also treat the pantry as a separate element and design statement doors accordingly:

• French doors with louvres give your kitchen a cottage feel
• Sliding doors provide an elegant option to easily shut messy contents away. They work perfectly in small or compact kitchens where you may not have the option to swing a door open on a hinge.  
• Glass or frosted doors mean you’ll be able to see the contents for a pop of colour – but you’ll have to pay extra attention to keeping things clean inside.
• Ribbed glass doors look classy, and give your pantry a statement piece look and feel.

Looking to update your pantry, or incorporate a butler’s pantry into your kitchen renovation or new home build? Speak to the interior designers at Apollo Kitchens to find out more.