We've all heard the kitchen be referred to as the heart of the home. This makes sense, as it truly is the space in our homes that we tend to spend the most of our time in. This may be for the more mundane or routine tasks or for whipping up new recipes and entertaining our friends and family. Whatever the task is, maintaining an efficient kitchen that is easy to work in is vital to the experience that we have around cooking. When designing your new kitchen, or even rethinking your current one, consider a few of the following features that can help you get the most use out of your kitchen by making the daily chore of cooking easier and therefore more enjoyable.

Small appliances really are all the rage these days. From the Instant Pot to the array of air fryers on the market, it seems unavoidable to be constantly adding more kitchen clutter to our counters. With the onset of the new trend of minimalism, many people are left with the dilemma of where to store all of the extra gadgets so that kitchen counters can remain clear and functional. It's easy to see why so many people have opted to allocate cabinet space to these small appliances. If you have the means to design a cabinet specifically for small appliance storage, you may thank yourself later when the bread machine you use only occasionally during the winter months doesn't need to claim vital real estate next to your stove year-round. When working with the kitchen you already have with no extra cabinet space to spare, a hot trend is utilizing a storage system such as a baker's rack to store all the small appliances in one place so that it remains easily accessible yet out of the way for occasional access.

Open shelving is a design feature that has begun to adorn the kitchens featured in many magazines and other publications. There are a number of benefits to be had by removing cabinet doors and allowing all of the contents to be on display in your kitchen. Firstly, showcasing the contents of your kitchen does force you to take stock of what you want the world to see. Decluttering is a natural consequence of this design choice, which means that your kitchen will retain only what you really need and use, quickly making your kitchen more efficient. Open shelves also make accessing commonly used items such as spices, oils and prep bowls that much easier when you're busily cooking and moving around the kitchen. One of the greatest ways that open shelving contributes to the efficiency of a kitchen is by making it simple to retrieve dishes, which is great for encouraging young children to help out at mealtime. Open shelving also makes the dreaded chore of unloading the dishwasher a breeze; dishes can easily be sorted and put in their respective places with little hindrance, as there are no doors to navigate.

Another design choice that you may not have considered for your kitchen is having rolling shelves. It's not uncommon for valuable space in a cabinet to go unused when items get shoved and lost in the very back. Rolling shelves are a great way to make your kitchen more efficient, as they allow you to access all of the contents of a cabinet without having to dig far back. Vertical rolling shelves are an especially great remedy for high cabinets that often go overlooked or underutilized because they are too difficult to reach. If you can't install any new drawers in your current kitchen situation, get creative with the ones that you do have. Rather than dedicating an entire drawer to junk, consider using this drawer space to store your spices in an innovative way that makes them easier to see and retrieve than even dedicated spice racks can.