How To Make The Most of a Breakfast Bar in Your Freestanding Kitchen

There’s a wide range of benefits involved in installing a breakfast bar in your freestanding kitchen. As well as providing a welcoming, communal hub for your family and guests, it can offer superb space-saving and storage options, too. 

Utilizing your freestanding kitchen island as a breakfast bar is a popular method of creating a social eating area in the kitchen. A place where the family can congregate for coffee and the day’s most important meal. Let’s take a look at some of the features you’ll need to consider before choosing the perfect breakfast bar for your freestanding kitchen.

Practicality and positioning

Location is a key factor for your breakfast bar. Its position not only needs to find a logical spot for morning mealtimes, it must also serve as a practical partition between living and cooking areas—so it’s worth thinking about the shape and layout of your kitchen before focusing on any design particulars.

When planning your breakfast bar’s location, consider its daily functions. How many people in the household eat breakfast together? Do you have friends over for coffee and a catch-up? Will it need to double up as a workspace for those mid-morning conference calls? Considering all the possible duties your freestanding unit will need to cater for will help shape the design of your breakfast bar.

Lighting solutions

To ensure that your kitchen breakfast bar or freestanding island performs as a relaxed morning congregation area, you’ll need to think about a practical and visually impactful lighting set-up.

Before embarking on a plan to install artificial lighting for your kitchen island breakfast bar, it’s important to design and position your unit to utilize windows and your kitchen’s natural light. Once this element has been addressed, why not incorporate LED flexible strips to create ambient mood lighting for your breakfast area—particularly useful on those dark winter mornings? They can be a brilliant way to add depth and dimension to a room, while being easily changeable for different atmospheres when required.

Integrate your appliances

If you’re looking for a slick and ultimately functional freestanding kitchen, there’s plenty of scope to integrate your appliances within your breakfast bar island. Whether it’s fridges, dishwashers, ovens, stove tops— even a second sink—by concealing your everyday-use equipment within your island, you’ll not only save space, but also keep these features in easy reach for practical tasks. You can further add to the streamlined aesthetic by hiding appliances behind beautifully-handmade wooden cabinet doors.

Mix and match

From an aesthetics standpoint, if you’re looking to move away from a more uniform look, why not opt for a range of different materials for your breakfast bar to add character, while visually isolating the area from the rest of the kitchen? Create a dedicated design profile for your breakfast zone with contrasting materials and finishes. 

Indeed, breakfast bars are designed to be flexible – and there's a range of options at your disposal to create a truly bespoke kitchen unit. Whatever size, shape or layout you're working with, Hugo & Blake can create the perfect kitchen breakfast bar for you. So why not get in touch and see how we can help?