When first designing a kitchen, many people take to Google to find nuggets of advice to get the process moving, and one of the first things you’ll discover is the concept of the kitchen triangle. What is the kitchen triangle? In short, it’s a rule that helps you keep the three most important aspects of the kitchen i.e. the sink, the fridge and the oven configured to make your space as practical and easy to use as possible.
Why The Sink, The Fridge & The Oven?
For the same reason the keyboard on your computer isn’t in ABCD format. At some point in time, we took a critical look at how to arrange something in a better way based on the frequency of use and how those things are used together. In most practical uses of the kitchen, these three features of a kitchen are used most frequently together and therefore should be arranged in such a way that you don’t have to spend a lot of time walking between them.
Going further than this, the rule suggests that the perimeter, (the total length of the lines if you were to draw the triangle) should be longer than 13 feet but no longer than 26 feet. This is observed to be the optimal arrangement for creating an efficient kitchen space allowing you to clean, cook and store food in a way that means preparing a meal doesn’t require a personal trainer.
Where Might the Kitchen Triangle Rule Not Work?
As with every rule in design, it works well until it doesn’t anymore. Kitchen design is always being influenced by behavioural changes which have been significant over recent decades.
- Cooking together
Gone are the days where it’s an assumption that one partner stays at home and prepares an evening meal for the family. It’s more likely that if a meal is prepared, two or more people will be in the kitchen together creating light work of the food preparation. This calls for an adjustment to the kitchen triangle rule as this never took into account the idea of being able to accommodate more than one person.
- Preparing quick meals
For some, preparing meals in advance or purchasing ready meals makes a lot more sense. In this case, the distance between the fridge or freezer and the microwave is far more important. The triangle rule makes an assumption that every meal is created from scratch and even when an elaborate family meal is prepared, it’s not uncommon that several elements of the meal will be pre-prepared and ready to heat and serve.
What the kitchen triangle rules teaches us is not that there is a hard and fast rule for designing your kitchen, but rather that your lifestyle needs to be a strong factor in informing your decision making, and not anybody else telling you what is right or wrong.
This is where it’s useful to take advice and talk to a kitchen designer who can take you through the showroom and share their experiences of previous designs and how customers with similar requirements reached their chosen design.