© Leicht

An Exploration of Kitchen Pantry Design

Discover the rules of effective pantry design

If you’re blessed with the space, invest in a kitchen pantry. It’s a concept that hasn’t always been popular. But as kitchens have evolved, the humble kitchen pantry has become an almost indispensable addition to many kitchens. In fact, most homeowners put the kitchen pantry on top of their “wants” list these days. It’s not hard to see why. Whatever the size of your kitchen space, you’ll always need a convenient place to store your groceries. This critical storage requires careful thought and planning, and a pantry to make things easier.

But what goes into designing the perfect pantry? For starters, a pantry should be large enough to hold at least a week’s worth of groceries, and close enough to the food preparation area to be easily accessed. Size matters of course, but with the right combination of simplicity, organisation and location, you can easily create a pantry equally as functional as a full-size walk-in.

There are a few key characteristics of an effective kitchen pantry:

Convenient. Your pantry should be located at or near the area where food is prepared.
Visibility. Everything in the pantry should be seen at a glance.
Accessibility. It should be possible to remove items without moving others around.

In creating a pantry of note, it’s important to stick to these 3 principles. By doing so, your pantry will almost always be convenient and easy to use. Now for some more information on the most popular pantries available to homeowners today:

The kitchen pantry is getting more popular than ever before. © Leicht

Reach-in Pantries

Reach-in pantries are shallow cabinet-style pantries where the goods are stored on shelves that aren’t too deep. Deep pantries, of course, hold more goods. If you have the depth, you’d be tempted to use the entire space by installing deeper shelves. This is a mistake. Inevitably things you use often get pushed to the back as you add other things, so you end up with stuff you cannot find or get to without moving the things in front of the items you need. This is a clear breach of effective accessibility discussed earlier: “It should be possible to remove items without moving others around.”

Some of the best reach-in pantries available are what’s called “batwing” pantries – with doors that carry many items too. It does not require extensive pull-out hardware, which, because it must be able to hold a lot of weight, must be heavy-duty and can be costly.

contemporary kitchen cabinets

Pull-out Pantries

A pull-out pantry is essentially one big shelf that slides from out of the unit or wall. The shelf can be accessed from both sides, a move that helps it tick the accessibility box well. While not quite as convenient as a batwing reach-in pantry, the pull-out pantry is a good option if your space isn’t particularly wide.

This is also a slightly more expensive solution. It is important to use gliding hardware that prevents the pantry from being slammed – and this comes at an extra cost. The individual shelves inside the pull-out can be made adjustable though, a fact that improves the flexibility of this style of pantry.

© Leicht

Walk-In Pantries

As the name suggests, a walk-in pantry is a small room or closet dedicated to food storage. For many homeowners, this the Shangri-la of pantries, and unfortunately, a mere dream for apartment dwellers. A walk-in is, of course, an excellent choice for storing large quantities of goods. One drawback though, is that if the pantry is too big, it could become inconvenient to use on a daily basis. In this case, a smaller pantry or shelf is recommended to stock often-used items that need to stay close at hand.

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