Designing a Family-Friendly Kitchen Renovation

At Melanson Homes, we pride ourselves in our family-first approach to homebuilding. Because we love to work with families and help them create spaces that foster togetherness, some of our favourite projects ever have been kitchen renovations.

The kitchen is arguably the most community-oriented room of your home (your living area might be a close second). It’s where you find family and friends cooking, eating and enjoying each other’s company day in and day out. Although a kitchen is a place where the people in your home tend to gather together naturally, there are design elements you can integrate to make it even more inviting and family-friendly.

The secret to a family-friendly kitchen is designing it in such a way that it draws people together and selecting materials and features that support your family’s day-to-day life. Here are our top design suggestions to make the final product of your kitchen renovation as family-friendly as possible.

Open Floorplan

Merging the kitchen with adjoining rooms, with an open concept layout, lets the whole family interact while doing different activities. Cook dinner while helping your kids and teens with their homework assignments. Carry on a conversation while the dish pit crew cleans up after a meal.

Check out this recent home renovation project, in which we transformed a traditional kitchen into a modern, open-concept space.

Window Placement

In every room of your home, window placement is key — especially the kitchen. Is there anything that makes a room more inviting than natural lighting? Also, having a window onlooking the backyard from the kitchen is something to consider if you have kids. This allows you to keep an eye on their outdoor activities while doing tasks in the kitchen.

Wipeable Wall Paint

When it comes to painting kitchen walls, it’s better to go with a shiny paint rather than matte. By choosing a semi-gloss or satin paint your walls will be easier to wipe clean, whether the marks are fingerprints or tomato sauce from your toddler’s first spaghetti dinner.

Create a Work Zone

When designing your kitchen renovation, try focusing all of the kitchen amenities on a single wall. This will help create a workflow in your kitchen and keep visitors out of your work zone.

Computer Corner

Outside of your kitchen work zone, create a little computer corner in your kitchen. This is extremely convenient as it gives you the chance to look up recipes or surf the web while you wait for dinner to cook. With the computer station in the kitchen, you can also help your kids while they do their homework or supervise their online activity! You can even expand this corner to include a message board for your family’s schedule, meal planning and anything else you need to communicate to multiple family members.

Walk-In Pantry

If you have enough space, a walk-in pantry is a great way to make your kitchen renovation more family friendly. Having all of your non-refrigerated foods in one place makes grocery shopping and meal planning that much easier. Also, a spacious pantry can help you avoid cluttering the countertops – which will make your kitchen feel bigger and easier to work in!

Choose Cabinets Wisely

We encourage homeowners to choose cabinets that express their unique taste and make their kitchen feel like their own! However, if you have kids, we recommend you save the high-gloss, lacquered cabinetry for when there aren’t sticky fingers around to leave their marks. Cabinets with a more distressed and stained surface will hide more smears and smudges that little ones always leave behind.

Easy-Care Countertops

Like cabinetry, family-friendly countertops are those that are durable, wipeable and practical. We recommend choosing materials with a little texture, like leathered granite, honed quartz surfacing or concrete, rather than highly polished stone slabs.

The kitchen is the setting of countless meals with family and loved ones, and sharing moments together over your morning coffee or a late-night cup of tea. With every kitchen renovation (and every project we work on), we consider the family in every detail. When the project is done, we have a warranty twice as long as the industry standard for all materials and labour. After all, Together We Build Better.

Learn more about our kitchen and whole home renovation services here and check out some of our past projects in our project collection.