Senior Friendly Designs For Your New Kitchen.
When it comes to designing your kitchen we often don’t think 10 or 15 years down the track. Thus you should think about how well your kitchen design will help you enjoy life now and tomorrow.
What is a Senior Friendly Kitchen?
We define it as a kitchen space capable of assisting with kitchen activities in the most effective way possible to reduce stress and strain on our bodies. As we age certain things become more difficult to accomplish. Some of the more common issues experienced by seniors are:
- Some degree of movement restriction
- Back problems
- Problems with major joints like hips and knees
- Stamina – we get tired a lot quicker
- Diminishing muscle strength
- Eye sight issues that will affect our ability to cook
In other words it’s imperative to create a kitchen that limits body movement - kneeling, stretching and bending – as well as reduce muscle stress, and improve visibility of the items stored in the kitchen.
What can be done?
There is a host of very simple ideas and smart approaches towards kitchen space design that can make our lives so much easier now and in retirement. Here are some of the more common suggestions:
- Plan your kitchen to fully utilise the philosophy of 5 kitchen zones (Consumables, Non-consumables, Cleaning, Preparation and Cooking). By planning your kitchen with these 5 zones in mind, the distance travelled in the kitchen during routine tasks is heavily reduced and therefore it is a lot less stressful on our bodies.
- Use inner dividing systems in the drawer units - organisation is the key. It’s a lot easier to pick up an item from its place then dig around in the drawer with no dividing system. A further improvement in the usability and friendliness of the inner dividing system is rounded bottom edges of containers as nothing will get stuck in the corner making it the most convenient and user-friendly drawer organization solution.
- All drawers should be able to be fully extendable. This means that the back panel of the drawer, when it is fully extended, should come out to at least the same level as the front level of the cabinet. This way you will not need to stress your body when bending to see what is hiding at the back of the drawer.
- Corner cabinets are some of the more stressful parts of the kitchen on our body. Constant kneeling and stretching as well as a restricted view of the contents is a norm for most of the corner cabinets. Thankfully, there are solutions to this problem. For example, Space Corner is a corner solution based on the extendable drawers where bending down is not required and objects are well organized and easy to remove.
- Opening heavy drawers is not pleasant especially if you have to do it all the time in the kitchen. Servo-Drive makes opening and closing any drawer simple and easy. The electrical support system in the Servo-Drive mechanism opens any pull-out in a breeze. All that is required to operate it is a light touch and the drawer opens and soft closes by itself. There is no longer a need to bend when opening lower drawers - a simple touch of the front panel with your knee will do the job perfectly.
- One of the hazards brought in by the limited field of vision associated with age relates to opening doors in the upper cabinets. However, this issue is easily solved by installing a lift system. Compared to the traditional cabinet drawer, a lift system moves upwards out of the way minimizing the risk of injury. It’s also easy to open and it will stay in any position as soon as you let go.
As you can see, the ideas on making a kitchen a senior friendly environment is applicable to any age category, not just seniors, and will deliver enhanced enjoyment of the kitchen space to anyone operating in it. So next time you plan your kitchen, give a little thought to making it easier to use by anyone anytime and really focus on the important things in life like entertaining your friends at a dinner party and enjoying the conversation with the loved ones without feeling tired and run down from expending too much energy in the kitchen.
