The Smarter Kitchen: Eat-in Kitchen Design Ideas for Your Home

Even if your home boasts a lovely dining area that’s suitable for daily meals or even for posh entertaining, there’s a good chance that you spend way more time eating in your kitchen than you do in your dining room. Dining rooms are nice, but it’s harder to clean up after eating there and shlepping food back and forth just winds up being far more inconvenient than eating meals in the kitchen.

Because the kitchen often becomes the favored spot for chowing down at breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and maybe a snack or two in between), it’s a wise idea to create a kitchen design that allows for you and/or your family to eat comfortably in that room. It’s also fun to add a little pizzazz to the eating area to visually separate it from the cooking space. The possibilities are many, including some of these ideas.

Use your island wisely

You can totally use your kitchen island for seating, especially if it’s fairly large. But you can also do a few other clever things with it to expand seating possibilities. For example, you can create bench seating on one end of your island and then put a small table on that end with two or three additional chairs. This way, you’ve got at least four spaces there plus whatever else is available at the island.

Similarly, you might also put your dining table end to end with your island, which gives you one long, continuous eating surface that could potentially seat 8-12 people!

If your island is small, you can add one or two stools, which is sufficient if you live alone or with one other person. That might be all the seating space you require in the kitchen.

Otherwise, you can simply use your island as a divider between the cooking space and the eating space, leaving it solely for food preparation purposes and not for dining.

Use color and texture for a more enticing eat-in space

There are all sorts of ideas available to make any eat-in kitchen more interesting to the eye.

The use of color, for example, can take a rather mundane space and make it pop. So, if your cabinets and countertops are rather subdued, consider adding a table and/or chairs that are vibrant in color. If you prefer to stick to the same color palette as your other pieces rather than go rogue with color, use texture instead to make your eating area stand out. Tufted bench seating or chairs are interesting to the eye, for example. You can also choose a muted pattern in the same colors as your cabinets and countertops just to mix it up a bit.

Similarly, you can opt for other contrasts, like a high-top table that sits higher than your island or vice versa.

Capitalize on your aesthetic

Kitchens come in a variety of styles. Whether yours is ulta-modern or super traditional, you can craft your eating area so that the entire space blends seamlessly.

For example, if you went for industrial for your overall kitchen style, your table and chairs for the dining area, as well as light fixtures and other accessories, can be of the same style. If you’ve got a French country-style kitchen, with creamy cabinets and lots of blues and yellows, continue with the same color table and comfy chairs (maybe even wicker) with lovely floral-patterned cushions. It’s okay to be matchy-matchy if that’s what you prefer. Or…

Create an entirely separate space

While some homeowners like the idea of continuity from their cooking area to their eating space, others prefer to separate the two. There are a number of ways to achieve that division of space.

If you have the square footage available, you can literally separate your eat-in area from your food prep area. Some designers suggest pretty French doors with lots of glass to separate the two parts of your kitchen. If you don’t have that kind of space, you can create a separation by using some crown molding on the ceiling and using contrasting materials for the dining space.

Similarly, placing a bold chandelier over the dining table can draw your attention to that space and move it away from the preparation area, essentially creating a separate room even though there are no physical dividers. You might also consider building a breakfast “nook”, which also gives the eating area the feeling of being a separate and cozy space, often situated near a window.

Have some ideas of your own? Want to brainstorm with our kitchen experts at Mr. Cabinet Care? Give us a call and we’ll set up a no-obligation consultation with you to discuss potential plans for your new eat-in kitchen design.