My love for modular kitchens and kitchen design is no secret. The more you see, the more you want. That’s the paradox of choice. From experience, seeking professional help to channel one’s requirements into a product is essential for a kitchen. The thin line between fancy wants and needs is blurred. Imagine my excitement on receiving an invite to the store opening event of Stosa Cucine, the latest to dot Bangalore’s modular kitchen landscape. GoodHomes magazine in collaboration with Mirius Interni opened the doors to the new Stosa Cucine showroom in Jayanagar, Bangalore. Mirius Interni in association with Stosa Cucine offers a gamut of modern, contemporary and classic modular kitchen designs from the iconic maker. There are seven kitchens on display at the showroom: A rustic modular kitchen…
Walls. Walls. Walls. When it comes to dressing up a home, walls take precedence over everything else. The possibilities are endless for wall as a canvas: a fresh coat of paint with the color of the season, a wall paper, a collage, an over-sized art work, graffiti, doodling on the wall, decal or color blocking. Doors have always fascinated me. I love doors that are painted yellow, blue – they are showstoppers like no other. I wanted to do something different for the entrance of my son’s room: on the door, of course. My inspiration for the door came from here. This is a beautiful work of Switch Over Studio. My son has been a huge fan of the Peanuts since he was five. So…
Someone recently asked me to recommend a place to buy a queen size bed. It’s been a while since I have bought furniture from a brick-and-mortar store. All the furniture for our new home came were bought online: some great experiences and some we will regret forever. What makes all the difference It’s not just the designs, quality, and price that make the difference; for me customer service experience has to be good. In that area, Urban Ladder wins hands down. Been a customer ever since they started. Pepperfry comes a distant second mainly because their delivery and assembling process is not streamlined and haphazard. Though I have had good experience with Pepperfry for smaller items. Insaraf – wouldn’t recommend even though they have good…
The minute you saw the words “design”, “kitchen”, and “secret tips” in the title, you were tempted to click, weren’t you?
It’s not just you. For most of us, life revolves around the kitchen, and the kitchen is built around the family. The fragrance of freshly baked cookies or the sweet aroma of rice kheer envelops the house..and you know it from the smile of the family as they walk in through the door at the end of the day. No other place in a home works as hard or brings as much joy.
Kitchen is also the most difficult part of the house to design. One area where it is a tough balance between aesthetics, functionality, and personality. I’ve included personality because the style of cooking and a family’s habits is individualistic, one that plays a critical role in a kitchen’s layout.
When it comes to kitchen design, everyone talks about the famous triangle linking the sink, stove/hob and the refrigerator. But, rarely does anyone talk about these secret tips that stem right from your dreams, your vision of your dream kitchen. So, let’s dive straight in as I share my secrets with you:
1. Focus on one element: Pick a focal point. Each one of us dreams of how we want our home, especially kitchen, to look like. It could be anything. For me, it was a window in the center of the kitchen with sink beneath it and an east-facing kitchen to let the morning rays flood in. For you, it could be open shelves, color of the cabinets, placement based on Vaastu or Feng Shui principles, and just about anything. Identify that element close to your heart and work around it. Everything else in the kitchen should complement that element. What do you think is the focal point of the kitchen below?
“Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.” Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Words of wisdom. It’s your home. Design it the way you have always dreamed of.
Double height ceiling living room culminating in the terrace. The living and dining with tall, wide windows. flanked on either side by garden. A flood of natural light fills up the house. Long walkway leading to the bedrooms on the first floor with double height living room on one end and staircase on the other.
That’s our home. It’s dramatic. We fell in love the first time we saw it.
Wish you all a very happy Ganesh Chaturthi…along with Diwali, it is one of the festivals all of us at home look forward to with eagerness. Here is a glimpse of the many forms in which pulayar has come home over the past decade.
This was in 2006, the last time ever we got home a colored Ganesha.
We connect with Indira Nagar like no other neighborhood of Bangalore. It is a good stress buster. So, after a long afternoon sifting through bolts of fabric for curtains got the better of us, we decided to take a break and drove to Indira Nagar. The son with his fancy ideas was in the mood for Cranberry tea at Infinitea. I devour my masala chai at home or at Tea Brew and nothing else is good enough for me. After the tea stop, we ambled through 12th Main when the signage on a board intrigued me. The husband and son were a few steps ahead of me, so I called them back and we were delighted to find this place called Bheem Styx. Styx – a…
Every morning, for 50 minutes from 6:30 a.m. to 7:20 a.m., my kitchen is a flurry of activity. Lunch boxes spread over the counter, tea on one burner, breakfast on another, and cooker on yet another. Pots and pans strewn around. But, this is an organized chaos that we all have got used to over the years. If there is one thing that upsets this schedule, it is not being able to find what you are looking for. And often, it is the lid of something, or a Nutella bottle that was accidentally kept in the fridge.
I’m at West Bengal for a fortnight. Contrary to popular belief, life is not laid back in the village. It’s bright and sunny at 5:45 a.m., and if you are like us, a ray of light sneaking through a crack in the window is enough to jerk us out of bed; no matter how much I’d like to pull the blanket over my head and sleep in. What if the clock was set half an hour earlier for the eastern parts of the country? Monsoon has been intermittent this year. The fields are not lush-green. These pictures are from October last year of a dish I enjoy eating immensely: peetha. One of the highlights of our trip. It’s called peetha, and from what Nandita of…
How are you folks doing this summer? I’ve never had so much fun in April-May the past few years…it’s been all about digging my head deep into five volumes of books for the exam always fell on the first Sunday of June, and when it was time to let my hair down, the school reopened. Freedom is what I associate this summer with. I hope you are having a blast this summer, too. I’m on vacation for a month here in the US. Last afternoon, browsing through racks and racks of neatly lined china, and organizers, I felt like a bull in a china shop.
I’m not fond of Tupperware, and given a chance would like to get rid of all the plastic jars in my kitchen. Imagine my delight on finding white ceramic crockery and vintage jars stacked adjacent to each other :) Don’t you love this jar?
