Published: 23 April 2025 · Reading time: ~6 minutes · Author: The Braseco Team
Almost everyone starts the same way. With a saved photograph, a door colour, a handle they liked somewhere. Those are real decisions — they are just the last ones on the list, not the first.
The order in which you decide determines how well the kitchen works. The colour only determines how it photographs.
A kitchen is designed from the route through it, not from the colour.
Step 1. Where the water, gas and extraction are
These three do not move easily, and when they do, they cost more than any door front. The waste stack needs a fall, so the sink cannot go just anywhere. The extractor needs either a duct route or filtration, and the difference between the two is decided now, not on installation day.
The first useful drawing of a kitchen contains no cupboards at all. It shows where the water comes in and goes out, where the gas is, and where the air can leave.
Step 2. The route between fridge, sink and hob
Cooking is a sequence: take out of the fridge, wash, chop, put on the heat. The three points you move between constantly are the fridge, the sink and the hob, and between them you need clear worktop to work on.
Two mistakes come up often. First: the hob pushed against a wall or a tall unit, with nowhere beside it to set down a lid or a pan taken off the heat. Second: the sink tucked into a corner, where you cannot stand square in front of it.
There is no magic distance. There is only the question of whether, walking from one to the other with your hands full, you have to open a door with your elbow or squeeze past the table.
Step 3. Storage, sorted by how often you use things
Daily items belong between waist and shoulder, within reach, with no bending and no step stool. Weekly items can go down into deep drawers. Things used a few times a year — the good dinner service, the large appliances — go up high, where you cannot comfortably reach anyway.
A drawer beats a shelf almost every time. On a shelf you see the front row and reach blindly for the back. In a drawer with full extension, the entire contents come out to you. The price difference pays for itself in how you use the kitchen every day, not in how it looks.
Step 4. Hardware and the inside of the units
Hinges, runners, corner mechanisms and drawer organisers are the part you never see in the final photograph and the part you touch several hundred times a year.
This is where a saving made at the wrong moment shows up fastest. A drawer that does not pull out fully makes you reach for whatever is at the back. One that drags when loaded gets pulled with both hands. Small things, but they repeat daily.
Step 5. Only now, the fronts and the colour
Once the route is settled, the storage divided and the hardware chosen, the door front becomes what it should have been all along: an aesthetic decision made with full information. You already know how many drawers you have, where the extractor goes, whether a tall unit breaks the run.
In that order, the colour is easy to pick. In reverse order, everything else gets negotiated to fit around the decision you made first.
You can see it in the kitchen projects: the ones that work well are not necessarily the most expensive, but the ones where the decisions were taken in the right order.