Our Guide to Pantry Options

The key to choosing the best pantry option for your new kitchen, is to ensure its functionality and user-friendliness.

The Jag Kitchens design consultant team are here to help guide you through the process of designing pantry options that not only look good, but work well in every day life. Pantries with poorly designed doors, or badly arranged compartments, or with the absence of space and accessibility are all nightmares that can be avoided with the help of Jag Kitchens.

Use our quick-fire guide below to address the most obvious issues before they happen, or take some inspiration to include some fresh ideas for pantry options into your new kitchen design.

Light

A common mistake often made when people are designing or installing their pantries is to have either poor lighting or none at all. Pantries are generally built without the use of a window, so there is usually very little natural light.

A great solution to ensure you have quality lighting to see the contents of your pantry, is to install in-cabinet lighting with the use of LED lights. Our blog on choosing kitchen lighting has some fantastic tips on the best way to light up your space to suit your needs.

Space

One of the more frequent mistakes we see when it comes to choosing a large pantry option, is something with a door that gets in the way! Doors that open inwardly will knock items over, or partially block your view of the interior. Outward opening doors give more room for the interior pantry shelves, but only if there is plenty of space outside the pantry to swing the door wide. Jag Kitchens has a range of pantry options available to suit the design of your kitchen space. Pull-out pantries are very popular, as are on-bench pantries and those with various mechanisms to ensure accessibility issues are a thing of the past!

Not only should your pantry be well lit, you’ll also need to be able to get in and out of your pantry quickly when cooking. If the pantry isn’t positioned within an ideal space in your kitchen design, you’ll end up creating more work for yourself when moving around your kitchen or when prepping a meal. Also consider the process of re-stocking your pantry and where it is in relation to benches and tables in the kitchen. A kitchen benchtop that is just outside a pantry will prove to be convenient for setting down groceries.

Materials

The likes of a walk-in pantry should include a good quality, sturdy material for the shelves and interior cabinets, with a finish that complements the rest of the kitchen. The inside of your kitchen cabinets will almost always be constructed from Melamine. This is a product manufactured from a wood bi-product core sandwiched between two layers of melamine material.

The board used for cabinets will typically be white, but you can always discuss a coloured interior  with your Jag Kitchens designer. Melamine is the accepted industry standard for cabinet construction because it is durable, easy to clean and reasonably priced. Of course there are other materials on the market too, such as timber or timber veneer, vacuum formed vinyl or acrylic.

Both the melamine and acrylic options offered at Jag Kitchens include Jag AQUA-SEAL™edge, which is a banding system that dramatically reduces the likelihood of moisture damage to your cabinets and significantly extends the life of your kitchen.

Accessibility

There is no point in having a pantry with floor-to-ceiling storage if you can’t access the items on the top shelf. When liaising with our clients, often one of their requests for their new kitchen design is to have pantry options which ensure quick and easy access to its contents.

The likes of hardware from two of our valued suppliers, Blum and Hafele, can ensure that hard to reach corners of your pantry are a thing of the past, thanks to corner solutions and modern mechanisms. These will bring forward out-of-reach shelving, or swivel the interior cupboards outwards for ease of collecting ingredients or appliances. Talk to your Jag Kitchens designer to learn more about the various options available.

The beauty of choosing Jag Kitchens is that our experienced designers know what works and what doesn’t – and can help you make design choices for a pantry option that you can be confident in. We’ll be beside you every step of the way, turning your dream kitchen into reality!

Book an appointment today for your free design quote, or pop in to see us at the Jag Kitchens Showroom, based in the Botany Town Centre.