A:

This is a great question! Back when I was in college, my professor taught us a super helpful tip about kitchen layouts called “The Kitchen Triangle.” When planning the layout of your major kitchen appliances (fridge, sink, and stove), the layouts with the best flow are always in a triangle formation. So let’s take our kitchen for example. Our fridge and sink are side by side and our stove is on an adjoining wall. If you were to draw a line from the fridge, to the sink, to the stove, and back to the fridge, it would form a triangle.

Source: Kate Marker Interiors

The reason “the triangle” works best is because it represents the traffic flow between your most used work zones. It allows you to easily move from one work space to the next and it takes into consideration road blocks (such as an island), multiple people in the kitchen (you can both move in a rotation), and distance. As far as spacing, there aren’t any hard and fast rules but it’s best that the appliances are neither too close (less than 4 ft) nor too far apart (more than 15 ft).

So to answer the question above – yes, we love the layout of our kitchen and find that it flows well!

There are so many layout variations that you can create using “the triangle,” but I put together a few basic kitchen triangle layouts that you can use as inspiration. I hope this helps your kitchen planning!