Special Series: Appliances: Part Three: Solutions for Small Spaces

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If you live in a big city, odds are that while the world outside your window is limitless, the space inside your kitchen is confining to say the least. Or, if you’re Perlick Corporation’s award-winning refrigerator drawers keep food organized and easily accessible. a suburbanite, instead of a finished basement, you have to make do with converting a closet into a laundry room. Whichever your predicament, there are numerous stylish, savvy and sophisticated solutions exist for your small space woes. “Just because you are talking small, doesn’t mean that people don’t want something nice,” says Maxwell Gilllingham-Ryan, founder of Apartment Therapy, a New York City-based interior design service. The key to designing for small spaces, he says, is to be inventive and creative in how you utilize each inch of space. Looking across the pond for ideas helps. “Small is still very new to this country,” says Gillingham-Ryan. “It is not new to Europe. That is where you are seeing these designs come from.” Keeping It Cool The refrigerator is the largest kitchen appliance, so it makes sense to target that behemoth first when looking to save space. Spain’s Fagor and Liebherr of Switzerland both offer a 24-inch wide refrigerator, the slimmest Fisher & Paykel’s curved door refrigerator allows for easy interior access. size available on the market. By conforming to the average cabinet width, these fridges allow for great flexibility when deciding where to locate items in your small kitchen. They do, however, require removing any cabinetry above the fridge. At more than 6-feet tall, these models reach vertically to add more storage space. Sacrificing cabinet space is worth it here, Gillingham-Ryan says, because those above-fridge cabinets are generally hard to access anyway and rarely used. Whichever model you choose, think about how your doors will swing and how far those drawers will pull out—and exactly how much space you’ll have in your kitchen to accommodate both. If you’re installing a full-sized refrigerator with interior drawers, remember to account for how far past 90 degrees the door will have to open to allow the bins to pull out, says Molly McCabe, a Seattle-based independent kitchen designer. She likes Fisher & Paykel’s curved door refrigerators, whose doors only have to open to 105 degrees to access the drawers—some doors must open 180 degrees

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