A good prep kitchen allows a homeowner counter space, extra convenience, a cleaner look to their home, and more. If you’re unfamiliar, this is a sort of additional kitchen which admittedly goes by many other names, including caterer’s kitchen, secondary kitchen, refrigerator pantry, mess kitchen, and butler’s pantry, to name just a few.
In this article, we’re going to examine just a few of the ways a prep kitchen can be a great addition to your home in the hopes of getting that creative spark going for when you next decide to renovate!
1: Extra Space
Extra counter space and, just more generally, the ability to organize a kitchen’s flow are some of the most significant benefits of a good prep kitchen. Experts tend to agree that these are features that functional kitchens need.
When most people consider a prep kitchen, this is the point they jump to first. The fact is that a good prep kitchen allows for dramatically more space compared to a traditional kitchen.
2: A Clean Look
A kitchen is one of the most openly dirty-looking spaces in most people’s homes. In some ways, this is unavoidable; it’s the nature of food prep.
However, a prep kitchen helps to spread things out and reduce clutter. Even in an open floorplan, there’s a notable difference between a small bit of chaos as you prepare food over a wide area over a dense bit of kitchen clutter in a smaller space.
A homeowner can install prep kitchens with a dishwasher, refrigerator, sink, extra ovens, additional counter space, and more. It all depends on what you want out of the space and what sort of meals you expect either yourself or catering staff to use the area to prepare.
3: Avoid Concessions
Many people find kitchen design something of a battle. Unless you’re designing your home from scratch, a kitchen often requires conceding convenience due to spatial limitations or other obstacles. A prep kitchen allows you to sacrifice less since you’re essentially allowing yourself a second “mini-kitchen” to take some of the requirements off of your main kitchen area.
(You can concede even less if you are building a custom home from the ground up. Our experts at Budingen Architecture can help you do just that!)
4: Better Flow
We briefly mentioned workflow before, but the point bears repeating. A prep kitchen allows the workflow of meal prep to go much smoother. This point is made most apparent with complicated meals and multiple people working on prep together.
The nature of a prep kitchen means that you can shift a meal to various “stations” at your kitchen, with relevant tools and supplies nearby. This idea contrasts with how a person prepares food in a traditional kitchen, where a meal often stands still as you have to bring the appropriate tools and ingredients to the prep area.
This design is stellar for things like caterers, who may need to prepare large quantities of food as quickly as possible and often do so with a small team. If you’re frequently preparing meals for large events, a prep kitchen is a must.
Want a Prep Kitchen? We Can Help
At Budingen Architecture, we make it our business to help our clients achieve the home design they want. If you’re looking to get a prep kitchen installed, we hope you’ll consider contacting us about the project and seeing how we might help!
We can help with more than just that too. If you require architectural plans for a space of just about any size or purpose, we can handle it.