If you don’t like the heavy look of wall cabinets in your kitchen, or if your budget won’t quite stretch to getting them in the quality you need, you may want to consider using open shelves as part of your kitchen design.
Open shelving in the kitchen can give you several different looks.
The most common is a casual, informal look, with items in daily use arranged on the shelves as convenient, rather than with any specific “decorator arrangement” in mind. This style often goes with country or farmhouse type kitchens.
For some folks, this is too casual, and they arrange their shelves so that while the items are conveniently placed they also look good, and include some purely decorative objects too.
At the other end of the scale, even minimalists can use open shelves: this is where you see the all-white china collection carefully arranged to be balanced and attractive, with one or two special decorative items. This look may be hard to sustain in everyday use.
Open shelves have a number of advantages which make them very attractive to some people:
A shelving system consists of the shelves themselves and a support system of some kind. It can range from wooden shelves attached to sides, almost like a cabinet with no doors, to wire shelves on brackets, and everything in between. Here’s a quick review of shelf materials and support systems
Wood (solid wood, plywood, particleboard; stained and varnished, painted, coated in plastic, or laminated)
Wire (plastic coated or chrome finished; different sizes of wires and different sizes of gaps between the wires; special accessories available)
Plastic (resin structural foam, light duty plastics)
Metal (rods, performated sheets, or solid sheets, often in stainless steel)
Sides (wood, metal, plastic; shelves adjustable or fixed within them)
Individual Brackets (wood, metal, plastic; plain or decorative shapes; prefinished or ready to be painted)
Bracket Systems (usually metal; tall pillars which screw to the wall, have slots for brackets at regular intervals).
Cleats (usually wood, screwed to the wall in permanent positions to support ends and back of shelves)
If you think you may need to rearrange your shelves on the wall, go for an adjustable bracket system. However, in the real world most people never adjust their shelves after they have set them up and filled them the first time, so the benefits of an adjustable system maqy be more imaginary than real.
The simplest way to use open shelves is just to put the idems you need to store, right on the shelf nearest to where you will use them most, and never mind how it all looks. This can actually look quite good if what you’re storing is naturally attractive and you’re not over-filling the shelves.
Most of us, though, need to do a little planning to get an attractive look.
Gather all the stuff you plan to place on the shelves together on a large table or counter, and take a good look at it.
Now split up your items by shelf. Arrange each set them on the shelf in a way that makes sense functionally, but which also makes sense visually: use color, size, texture and theme to group items.
Step back frequently as you work to get a sense of the overall look.
Don’t be afraid to rearrange several times, add and remove things, even start over if you’re not happy. Live with your arrangement for a while and then revisit it. Try taking pictures and looking at them – you get a whole different view than you do when just looking by eye.