Want a New Kitchen that’s Easy to Clean?
Find Out How!

You might love the idea of ornate molded wooden kitchen cabinetry, but will you still love it when it’s time to clean it? If you’re planning a new kitchen, it’s easy to get carried away with the more ‘glamorous’ design components. Sophisticated benchtops, modern cabinetry, feature lighting and sleek new appliances are all fun to think about. However, you’ll also want to consider how easy your kitchen will be to clean. 

Choosing Easy-to-Clean Materials for Your New Kitchen 

It pays to do your homework and research the properties of different material types before making your final decision. This means you’re able to make an informed choice about how much effort it will take to keep your kitchen clean. Let’s explore:

• Benchtops – smooth surfaces are the easiest to clean. Materials like quartz or laminate, make for smooth benchtops and are very low maintenance as they don’t require sealing. If you’ve got your heart set on tiles for your new kitchen, keep in mind that the larger the tile size, the less grouting you’ll need to scrub.
• Fridges – stainless steel fridges have a classic look, however, stainless steel surfaces also tend to show fingerprint smears incredibly well when compared with standard painted aluminium, which is the material of choice for lower cost fridges.
• Cook tops – the glass ceramic blend plates on many modern cooktops provide a smooth, easy-to-clean surface. While older-style burner and coil cooktops have their charm, it’s significantly harder to keep them clean and the process inevitably involves extracting the coils and scrubbing the caps and grates. 

Easy-Clean Colours 

If something doesn’t look dirty it’s unlikely you’ll think of cleaning it as often right? Hence our recommendation to think about the colours you want to use in your new kitchen, as some colours and shades show up dirt and dust like nothing else.

Pure white is considered ultra-high maintenance because every spill and crumb seems to leap out at you like a neon beacon. Black also shows up dust and grease marks incredibly well. The level of sheen on the surface can also affect the visibility of dirty marks.

So what colours are ‘living friendly?’ That would be your mid tones (neither dark nor light). They tend to be far more forgiving of minor scratches, dirt, dust and spills than say a rich dark blue or really pale yellow.

At Express Kitchens our design team can talk you through the ideal colour scheme for your new kitchen – factoring in ease-of-cleaning and the colour palettes of other rooms in your house.

Simple Design Features that Make Cleaning Easy

If you’re planning a new kitchen, simple design choices can save you cleaning time. Here are two of our favourites: 

• Easy-open handles – if you’ve ever tried to open a kitchen cupboard with knobs when your hands are dirty, it’s likely you’ve managed to spread the mess to the cupboard doors as well as the knobs. Easy-open handles, which you can grip without touching the cupboards, help restrict dirty finger marks to the handles themselves, avoiding mess build-up on cupboard doors
• Shelving – open plan shelving can look great and has proved a popular trend in recent years, however, kitchen cupboards have had doors for a long time for good reason – they help keep dust and kitchen messes out of your cupboards.  

When you’re planning your new kitchen it’s an opportunity to make your life easier by incorporating easy-clean materials and design elements. We hope this blog will help you on that path. 

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT EASY-CLEANING KITCHEN DESIGN

FREECALL 1800 675 605  OR CONTACT US ONLINE