Designing Your Kitchen to Also Function as a Home Office

Today’s kitchens are not your grandmother’s kitchen. The transformation of the modern kitchen extends well beyond technological updates, new inventions and improvements in efficiency and design of appliances. When designing your kitchen today, you may very well also be planning space where work that has little to nothing to do with cooking is done. The kitchen can be designed to incorporate elements of the home office.

Why should you consider designing your kitchen to also function as a home office? Well, perhaps you simply don’t have space for an office anywhere else. Or perhaps you write a blog about cooking. Quite possibly you find yourself so hard-pressed for time in your demanding schedule that you already are using elements of your kitchen to get other work done while preparing meals. So what ideas and concepts work best for designing a kitchen to do double duty as office space? Well, not everybody will have the same needs, but here a handful of helpful tips to consider, contemplate and calculate.

Six Degrees From Your Bacon

You definitely don’t want grease, food items or bacteria to come into contact with papers, documents, computers or other items commonly used in a home office. Designing your kitchen to also function as a home office means putting as much space as possible between the workstations used for cooking and for office work.

Cabinetry

As added protection against cross-contamination, you might want to consider the added expense of investing in cabinets for customized use. Cabinetry can be designed, constructed and put into place in your kitchen as protection for your office equipment against the unique situation of working in a kitchen environment. Closing up books, files, computers and other office elements behind sturdy cabinetry can not only offer added protection against things like grease and smoke, but also function as a way to conceal the office part of your kitchen when desired.

Computer Mounted Office Desk

Another way to protect computers operating within the kitchen environment is to set to work designing your kitchen with a work desk in which the computer screen is mounted below a counter featuring a see-through inset and a sliding keyboard. This option offers one of the best kinds of protection of sensitive computer equipment from the hazards of sharing the space in which you cook.

Sliding Cabinet Doors

When designing your kitchen for any use, it’s always wise to at least give some thought to the efficiency of cabinets with doors that slide out to reveal concealed storage space. This cabinet option is especially suitable for a kitchen that also functions as a home office. The sliding cabinet door can be opened to give you only as-needed access to things like paper, staplers, envelopes, computer storage and other office necessities. If you start the kitchen designing process with sliding cabinet doors a central part of the plan, this space can be exploited to conceal just about every trace of a home office but the wheeled chair when not in use.

Islands, Bars and Countertops

L-shaped islands, peninsula islands and counter extensions offer the simplest way of designing your kitchen to be used for home office purposes. If you rarely use your bar or island area for cooking, you might want to think about adding some cabinets below the surface or at either end to provide storage space while revamping the surface area to make it suitable as either a temporary or permanent work desk.