Plus a few bonus tips about the dining room Cindy Black, the Austin-based architect of Rick and Cindy Black Architects, married her design expertise with her love of cooking in 2008 when she launched Hello Kitchen. Hello Kitchen?s design team provides personalized kitchen designs for clients, both local and remote, with a "Recipe for Renovation," which includes detailed schematics that they can install themselves or hire a contractor to implement.
To date, the team has completed more than 200 kitchen packages. Here, Black shares the nine essential ingredients to for creating the perfect kitchen.
1. Begin with the big picture

Black starts by evaluating the kitchen?s existing conditions and reviewing certain elements, like doors and windows, which will affect how the kitchen should be arranged. She also reviews how the house is used in general and how the kitchen relates to adjacent rooms. "We start with the as-built plan to take a look at how everything?s working and what?s not functioning very well," says Black. The new design will address the shortcomings and patterns of use that she finds.
Next, she drafts several sketches of very different layouts to see what the client responds to, such as a U-shape versus a galley versus an L-shape. Once the rough layout is pinned down, appliances are chosen, since their dimensions affect counter and cabinet measurements.
"They?re the biggest pieces," she says. "I don?t want that to be a surpr...