Before I talk about cabinetry finishes or worktop materials with a new client, I ask them one question: how do you actually live? Not how you want the kitchen to look. How do you use it, day to day, meal to meal, school run to school run? Because the way you live should be shaping the way your space looks — and nowhere is that more true than storage.
Most people treat storage as the last thing on the list. You choose your units, your handles, your splashback, and then you figure out where everything is going to go. It's the wrong order. Good storage isn't the finishing touch. It's the bones of the whole space. Get it right first, and the aesthetic falls beautifully into place around it.
Vertical space is the most underused asset in any kitchen
When I renovated my own kitchen (see below), the brief was clear: calm, uncluttered, considered. To get there, we maximised every inch of vertical height by building full-height cabinetry right around the bank of appliances. Nothing was wasted. But beyond the practicality, that uninterrupted wall of storage is exactly what gives the kitchen its sense of stillness. There's simply nowhere for clutter to live. When things don't have a place to pile up, they don't. The design takes care of the tidying for you.
That's not a styling trick. That's clever planning.
For actress Steph Waring's kitchen in Urmston, one of her favourite elements is the larder unit. A tall, deep cabinet designed specifically for food storage, with internal shelving, pull-out drawers and a dedicated spot for small appliances to live completely out of sight. It sounds simple, and in a way it is, but the impact is huge.
A larder unit is the single thing that keeps a worktop genuinely clear. Not just clear when you've had a tidy up, but clear as a default. When your blender, your stand mixer, your snacks and your tins all have a proper home, your worktops become a workspace again. And a clean worktop makes the whole kitchen feel twice as generous as it actually is.
If you're planning a kitchen and you can only spend your budget on one thing, spend it on this.
The storage you can't see is the storage that earns its keep
This Worsley kitchen (see below) is the one I always come back to when people ask what good kitchen design really looks like. We created a fully fitted back kitchen — utility room, second fridge-freezer, washing machine, boot storage — hidden entirely behind a door that looks exactly like another floor-to-ceiling unit.
When that door is closed, the kitchen is pristine. Behind it, real family life is completely catered for. The messy, noisy, brilliant reality of a busy household has its own space, its own system, and none of it bleeds into the room you've spent time and money creating.
That's the goal. A space that looks designed and lives brilliantly at the same time.
The takeaway
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: prioritise the storage you can't see. The hidden storage, the clever storage, the storage that works so hard in the background that you almost forget it's there. Because when that's right, everything visible looks better. The finishes sing. The worktops breathe. The kitchen becomes the room you actually wanted.
That's not magic. That's good planning from the very beginning.
