A Low-Cost & Open Concept Kitchen with Stone and Industrial Touches

211

Minimalist
HDB (BTO)
~1,000 sqft
3 br
Couple Living

Welcome to our humble kitchen :) Our kitchen design has evolved so much during the designing stage and this is the result of eliminating a lot of the built in elements to cut cost and also utilising the materials that were available to us at the point of renovating. Because our kitchen is truly the heart of our home and also the only space we had renovations done, we prioritised on quality materials and a timeless design. It was never our intention to have a grey industrial kitchen (We almost chose laminates that were wooden like everyone else did). But because our sintered stone countertop only had a limited amount of design, we decided to embrace the more wabi-sabi stone look and opted for a concrete looking laminate for our cabinets.
The most obvious feature that we don't have in our kitchen is that we don't have top hung cabinets. This was mostly to cut costs so that we could afford other elements in our kitchen that mattered more for us. A couple months after our reno, we then added our dishracks and shelf from IKEA. Eventually, we would like to add more racks on the left side of our kitchen to balance out the appearance and to have more accessible storage for other kitchen essentials.
If there's one thing I would recommend more homeowners to practice in their own homes is to put away appliances into cabinets if you're not using them everyday. At this point, our counterspace is so sacred that we need as much space as we can get. So, keep appliances in our cabinets for the most part. The only appliance we keep out is our air fryer and microwave oven, but even that gets a separate rack.
As my husband is a chef, I let him decide on the type of stove to use. Of course he chose to have a gas stove which I honestly didn't mind. I know a lot of people contemplated between a gas stove and an induction because of the cleaning, but honestly, I don't find the cleaning any harder than when I used to use induction. Although, it only takes a little extra step to remove the grills. Overall, I still love the look of this thick cast iron stove. Quality wise, we did choose a lower tier stove which I definitely can see the signs of wear and tear after one year, but I still don't regret it as this was the only thing we could afford at that point of time and also an opportunity for us to upgrade to something better in future.
This area alone has changed so much, but I actually do love how lived in it looks now in comparison to how it used to look when we just had our kitchen renovated. We chose a farmhouse sink and we still love it one year later. Personally, I've always hated how stainless sinks smelled after cleaning. It has that sterile smell which is why we chose a ceramic one. The kitchen tap, we got it from Amazon US for $89 if I'm not wrong. This particular listing does not exist anymore, but we love it. It's not fancy, but it's in this beautiful brushed brass colour with a movable head to easily clean out the corners of the sink.
This was an area that came in at a later stage because it helped improve the flow of our kitchen and cooking lifestyle. This is where we place our Arden air fryer which I just recently upgraded and love because of the steamer and easy to clean feature. We also have our microwave oven there which was gifted by my mother who never used it. It's by Electrolux, but it's an older model which I don't think exists anymore.
This is our movable kitchen island where we mostly host guests to eat here. On a regular day, we usually have our meals on our coffee table in the living room. Our cats also love lounging on the kitchen island and bar stools for some reason.
As we hacked our kitchen walls to make the space an open concept, we have this area which we call our dry pantry. It's mainly our coffee and drinks station. It is still a work in progress, but we do ultimately intend to add some wooden shelves to distribute the appliances upwards, add some led lights because of how dark this area can get and ultimately upgrading our cup storage cabinet to a more solid wood cabinet with sliding doors.