Essential Kitchen Bathroom Bedroom Magazine May 2017 Back Issue

If there’s one area where you can never compromise on practicality when planning your kitchen design scheme, it’s in the materials you pick for your work stations and spashbacks. However, when we think of efficient and functional we so often think that things need to be clinical, clean and uncluttered, which is why in some ways we’ve had so many years of stark white kitchens, with durable stone, laminate and quartz worktops – people were understandably wary to diverge from the norm. Now, with new ideas breaking through all the time and developments in durable materials that are challenging our ideas of how a kitchen can look, we have become so much freer to be more brave with our style choices. Designers and kitchen companies are mixing up crafted cupboards with raw industrial elements, marbles with plywood and steel with lustrous finishes and the result is that so much more goes in kitchens now than ever before. Read Steal the Show, Emma Foale’s brilliant round-up of work hard, look great, make-a-statement surfaces on page 88. Just as in fashion, it’s all about the mix of the high-low – you can have a sleek kitchen or you can have a country-look kitchen but actually it’s when you start putting them together in mismatched ways that things start to get interesting. This issue there are so many kitchen ideas I love but one that really stands out is the one on the cover, which is a mix of cement and metro tiles, exposed copper piping, marble and mirrors. See interior designer Roisín Lafferty’s gorgeous work on page 68. Meanwhile for stunning real-life ideas on bedroom and bathroom schemes, with similarly exciting mixes of tactile woods and velvets with distressed industrial materials, don’t miss these two house interiors expert projects: Concrete Vision on page 138 and Grey Matters on page 170.