The Small & Stylish Kitchen, Part One


By Paul Miller

Interior Designer

Read Time: 6 Minutes

A number of years ago, I made dinner for some friends in their home as a thank you for a favor. They had a gourmet kitchen - I should know, I helped design it. When they brought me into their design, they had already worked out the scale with their architect. There was two of everything except the cooktop and it was massive.

Yet as I pivoted from one task to another, I felt like I was running a marathon. My arms were never long enough to turn one thing on while shutting something else off. It would have taken two of me to run that meal perfectly in that kitchen. Maybe I was just not a good fit because, loyal to the end to our old 1960s Frigidaire stove, I had gotten used to cooking with just two working burners for several years by then.


Cooking is an act of love and creativity, intimate and meditative, and should not send you racing all over the place like a mouse in a maze.

But it wasn’t just that everything was so much more souped up than in my kitchen. I really missed the comfortable scale of my workspace. I can craft a pretty complex soup from one comfortable corner, deftly moving from simmering roux to cutting board with just a little twist to the left. I realized after that workout of cooking at my friend’s house that when the time came to let the Frigidaire go and redesign my kitchen, I wanted to be sure the new layout kept me grounded and comfortable as I worked. Cooking is an act of love and creativity, intimate and meditative, and should not send you racing all over the place like a mouse in a maze. 

Maybe your home is older and the kitchen was small from the beginning. It might not be in your budget to expand the space or doing so would steal too much space from another area. Or maybe, like me, you’ve just come to realize that a big kitchen is not necessarily a good one. Here are some helpful ideas for making the most of a smaller kitchen.

Photo: Stacy Zarin Goldberg

Photo: Stacy Zarin Goldberg

Separate The Wheat From the Chaff

The usual complaint in a small kitchen is that people feel like they are constantly in each other’s way. One way to avoid that is to program the space so that there is a very clear zone for the most important task: preparing meals. This work zone should be a triangular layout that includes the three essentials: water, fire, and food stores.  To be clear, food stores are fridge and pantry; fire is cooktop and oven; and water is the sink.  Whether you have one sink or three, the one best suited for filling pots, scrubbing vegetables, and washing your hands between tasks should be in this triangle. 

The goal is to be able to work steadily at meal prep while outside of your area others can easily make themselves a cup of coffee or even toast a Pop-Tart. So keep toasters and coffee makers to the outside of the triangle. Keep in mind that in a small kitchen, being outside the triangle does not mean these appliances will be very far away.

Putting Your Cabinets To Work

Custom design is always best, but in smaller spaces it is even more critical. When your kitchen has spatial constraints,  a few practical considerations in the cabinetry design will improve functionality tenfold.

One way to get a lot out of a kitchen is to identify a wall where counter space can be sacrificed for maximum programing of other features. This would be where fridge, pantry cabinets, and wall ovens, all fairly deep elements, are allowed to dominate so that the rest of the room can be designed with greater openness in mind.  Remember that this wall where pantry cabinets and refrigerator are placed should be one of the three points on your work triangle. For a clean, custom look, work with your designer or cabinet provider to make sure that all of these appliances and cabinets project to the same extent, even if this means padding out behind cabinets to push them forward a bit or selecting a counter-depth fridge to reduce its depth. The plus for a shallower fridge is that you will do less digging to find things and likely save food from going to waste.


Clients often ask if I have a preference on lower cabinets between doors or drawers. The truth is I prefer drawers whenever possible.

Clients often ask if I have a preference on lower cabinets between doors or drawers. The truth is I prefer drawers whenever possible. Shallow drawers up top for utensils and linens, deeper drawers below for everything from stacked plates with pegs to pots and pans. Often slide out trays behind doors are presented as a reasonable compromise to drawers, but this is not a very intuitive choice. It asks that you first open a door and then pull forward a tray; with a drawer, you slide it open to get what you’re after and you’re done. One motion, clean and simple.

When budget is a consideration, you will always spend less with a door in front of a fixed or adjustable shelf. This might be a good option for a cabinet where you intend to keep things that you seldom access, like holiday dishes or that fondue set you are definitely going to get back into using. For sure, one day. Definitely.

Be Honest With Yourself

If my twenty years in design have taught me anything, it is that the best thing anyone can do before a single dollar is spent on renovations is to interrogate their wish list. The kitchen that would accommodate every Pinterest idea we ever liked would be the size of a football stadium.  We are inundated with cool ideas and beautiful pictures, but sometimes that can clutter our intentions and make us resent the confines of a kitchen that, otherwise, would serve us well.  Besides, most of those photos are pure fantasy. Who lives in the house where the mudroom cubbies only have to store one pair of yellow galoshes and a pristine soccer ball?


Who lives in the house where the mudroom cubbies only have to store one pair of yellow galoshes and a pristine soccer ball?

When you sit down to go over your kitchen wish list, start with the basics - the triangle - then program in the must-haves beyond that. Maybe for your family that is a dedicated station for the juicer or enough counter space for doing homework assignments. When you put functional needs first, it will become obvious pretty soon which ideas are making the design more complicated than they are worth.

Once you have gotten real with yourself about what your kitchen can accommodate, then you can make sure there are beautiful details that compliment the space and express your style.  Read The Small & Stylish Kitchen, Part Two, publishing June 16th, for insights on proportions, lighting, and using pattern .