Our kitchen was originally designed before we moved into the community, based on assumptions rather than how we would truly operate together. After 21 years of experience, we learned a lot and saved up to make impactful changes. In 2023, we began tearing apart our kitchen and over the course of a few months in 2024, we completed the project. These changes allowed us to design the kitchen around our processes rather than forcing our processes to fit the kitchen.
Our goal was to maximize functionality while maintaining an appealing appearance. To ensure our solutions addressed the most pressing issues, we held community-wide discussions and interviewed regular kitchen users. Key problems included a crowded stovetop layout, limited accessibility to the Hobart dishwasher, insufficient oven capacity, disorganized storage, and workflow challenges.
We started with simple, low-cost improvements, such as optimizing pot and lid storage, adding a spice rack, and reorganizing utensil drawers. These small changes paved the way for the larger renovation, ensuring our kitchen became more intuitive.
The new kitchen design emphasizes logical placement for activities like cooking, preparation, and cleaning, while enabling spaces to serve multiple purposes. Our principle: make storage easy to access from the inside but tidy and organized when viewed from the outside.
Theme: Serving
Theme: Preparation
Our new large central island promotes social connection between the 3 cooks, allowing them to make eye contact while prepping. This also enables the head cook to keep an eye on how prep projects are proceeding.
Theme: Cooking
We made several improvements to the cooktop area, including rethinking the range hood and removing upper cabinetry to enhance safety and usability. Additionally, we installed heatproof countertops on both sides of the stove, providing convenient spaces for cooks to quickly place hot items.
We also installed vertical organizers in the cabinet under the stove to neatly store sheet pans and muffin trays.
Theme: Cleaning
The previous Hobart "oven-door" style dishwasher wasn't very accessible. Many users found it challenging to bend over to insert or remove trays of dishes. This limited usability, especially for older community members. To address this, we replaced the oven-door-style Hobart with an upright model. Now, cleaners can slide the dish racks smoothly from start to finish. The trays never need to be picked up while loaded again.
Accessibility: We ensured that all kitchen pass-throughs are now at least 40 inches wide, meeting wheelchair accessibility standards.
Revised dish processing area. We removed the existing wall shelving and cabinetry in the microwave area and added a pass-through for dirty dishes to improve workflow.