The kitchen might be the busiest room in your house, but it needn’t be the most chaotic. We’ve chosen some of our favourite organisation and storage ideas from kitchens around the world to help make your mealtimes easier and more enjoyable.
Make it easy for everyone to help themselves in the kitchen with open storage. Keeping crockery and glasses next to the dishwasher and sink makes restocking the shelves a much speedier process.
Even urban homes with no outdoor space can still have their own vegetable patch. Transform your windowsill into a mini kitchen garden and keep your pruning tools to hand in a hanging wire basket.
Free up drawer space and start using the walls for extra storage. Stashing knives on a magnetic rack near your food preparation area is more convenient than having them all mixed up in a drawer.
Think about how best to store kitchen items before filling each drawer. Stack pans vertically and lids horizontally so that it’s easy to grab the size you need.
Increase the functionality of old kitchen cabinets by modifying them to make smarter use of space. If your cabinets are short on shelves, add wire baskets and plastic containers to keep the contents neat and well-organised.
A drying rack doesn’t have to mean doubling the area the sink occupies. Hanging a rack from the wall saves on space and helps the air get to wet crockery.
Get smart with rubbish and recycling storage. Choose different sizes and shapes of containers to suit different sorts of waste, and save on time spent sorting.
Add space to your kitchen with a portable trolley. Use it to store bulky items, or to wheel everything to the dining table in one go, rather than going back and forth.
Make it easier to set the table each day – create a one-stop station of everyday essentials, including crockery, cutlery and napkins.
Use transparent boxes and jars for food storage so that it’s easy to see where everything is – and to check what’s running low before you go to the supermarket.
If your kitchen has deep drawers, use every bit of that height to store jars upright. Save your shallower drawers for items like cutlery or flat tins.
You don’t need a separate spice rack to store your dried herbs and spices. In fact, they’re best kept in the dark, so a drawer is the perfect spot to keep them.