Storage Hacks for Beautiful Kitchens

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all cooking and eating at home much more – and for a lot of people, that’s meant finding new places to store all those extra ingredients we are buying! Making sure our clients maximise the space available to them is a key part of kitchen design at Back to Basics. It’s no good if your kitchen looks beautiful if there’s nowhere to store everything you need, in places you can get to easily and safely. In this post, we introduce two of our most popular storage solutions: the pan drawer and the larder cupboard.

Pan Drawers

First of all, always consider ‘pan drawers’ rather than traditional cupboards under your work surface. These sturdy solutions give you 35% more usable space than a regular base unit cupboard because you can get to everything you’ve stored there when you pull the drawer out – even the things at the back. This means you won’t forget those old packets and tins until they’re well past their use-by dates, and the easy access means cleaning is a breeze – something that’s really important as we fight this virus! You can have pan drawers fitted in your run of units along a wall, or in the base of an island, or even as a stand-alone piece of beautiful, functional furniture individually designed to your taste.

Pan drawers take a surprising amount of weight too – good quality drawer runners will take up to 70kg (which is the weight of a person!) so they are ideal for heavy crockery, pots and pans, tins and small appliances. It doesn’t really matter what the drawer itself is made of – focus on the quality of the runner and you’ll be able to load away to your heart’s content. Using custom made inserts in your drawers is another neat trick (literally!) for making the most of what’s available. Cutlery trays to fit what you want to store are a great way of using every scrap of space, and they make everything super easy to find.

And last but not least, having pan drawers as store-cupboards means you can see exactly what ingredients you have at-a-glance avoiding those annoying multiple purchases.

Larder cupboards

If you like your look more traditional, a full height larder cupboard is a lovely addition, especially if you are blessed with a good amount of worktop space and can give a little over to increase your storage. These can include any configuration of shelves, boxes, drawers and pull-out racks you like – we have never made two the same! In fact, our most unusual request was for a sloping shelf that rolled tins from one end to the other so the client could ensure she was always picking the tin that had the shortest use-by date.

Larder cupboards can fit floor to ceiling as in this photo here, or be shorter to allow you step-free access to everything inside. These cupboards are over 10ft tall – a grand and imposing statement while hiding all the clutter inside.

Pull-out racks have the same advantages over cupboards as pan drawers – especially if they are at chest height or eye level. Everything is within easy reach so you can see what you have in store and can clean easily. They utilise the full depth of the unit giving you that all-important usable space, and as in the picture on the left can be embellished or decorated to either stand out or blend in with your kitchen design, depending on what you prefer.