Creative Ways to Use Windows in a Kitchen Remodel

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All good designers understand how important it is for a kitchen to have «visual moments»—unique and striking visual elements that serve as focal points to anchor the entire design. How and where these moments pop up depends heavily on the orientation and characteristics of the space itself. From the actual size of the room to the existing structural features, very few kitchens are the same. But one element that many kitchens have is a window or two, and how this feature is used can be crucial to great kitchen design.

Almost every room designer loves the luxury of planning around one or more kitchen windows. Given the heavy presence of cabinetry lining the walls, a window offers welcome relief for the eye, as well as the obvious benefit of letting natural light into the space. Natural light brings a dose of real life to a room that no artificial lighting can replicate, and kitchen designers always look for ways to accentuate a window in one way or another.

The classic way to use a window in a kitchen is to situate the sink beneath it since almost everyone enjoys looking outside while washing dishes or preparing food. But there are many other ways to bring a kitchen window to life, and most involve moving the interest up to eye level. In the hands of a good designer, the visual moment offered by a window is often as much about beauty as it is about function.

Frame a Kitchen Focal Point With Windows

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If you have multiple windows in your kitchen, consider using the windows to frame a distinctive feature, such as the range hood. This technique can work amazingly well in kitchens that have commercial-grade cooking ranges and designer range hoods. Framed by windows, this feature can create an entire focal wall that anchors the kitchen design, especially when that wall is highlighted with a special surface treatment, like black subway tile.

In this example, inspired industrial shelving installed over the windows amplifies the visual punch.

Kitchen sinks and range hoods are common features to frame with windows, but just about any important feature can be highlighted, such as a butcher-block baking center, a wine rack, or an eating nook.

Integrate Windows With the Range Hood

Taking the idea of highlighting the range hood (or other significant feature) a step further, consider a custom-designed range hood that is tailored to integrate with the windows, as demonstrated in this kitchen. Here, a window is positioned over the custom hood, with two additional windows framing the sides.

A complete remodel may offer you unique options for using windows—don’t be confined by what is traditional in a kitchen.

Incorporate the Steel Window Look

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Windows framed with steel or steel-look aluminum are dramatic in any room, but especially the kitchen. A natural for modern decor, they can also be used effectively with traditional cabinetry and accents. In this example, the black metal windows offer a striking contrast with the lighter-colored cabinets. They might work just as well with gray or another dark cabinet color, where the effect would be complementary rather than contrasting. If new steel-framed windows are not in the cards for your remodel, consider painting the existing mullions on your wood windows to achieve a similar visual effect.

Create a Cabinetry Bridge Across a Window

Cabinetry plays a huge part in the kitchen, and integrating the cabinetry around a window can create a fluid and custom look. In this example, a cabinetry valance was installed to bridge the two wall cabinets flanking a large center window. This particular valance mimics the curve of the window itself, creating symmetry and maximizing natural light from the window.

Incorporate Decorative Sashes

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A great option is to let your kitchen window assume a decorative function through the use of unique sashes or ornamental glasswork. This approach works especially well if you have just a single window, often over the sink, where design options are limited. Making this single window stand out with decorative mullions and leaded or stained glass creates an instant focal point in the kitchen. This technique has been used for years for windows positioned over the tub in the bathroom, so why not try the same in your kitchen?

6 Best Free Kitchen Design Software For Windows

Here is a list of best free kitchen design software for Windows. Using these software, you can easily design a kitchen by adding and arranging essential components required to make a kitchen.

These software provide various modules and accessories to design a kitchen like kitchen cabinets, fridge, counters, dishwasher, kitchen devices, sink, etc. By using these accessories, you can make your own setup of a desired kitchen. After exporting objects to kitchen, you customize their size, texture, material, color, etc. You can also design a layout for your kitchen by using drawing tools like lines, shapes, text, dimensions, push/pull, and more. You can also add dimensions and text to your project in some of these software.

These free kitchen design software provide 2D and 3D plane to create, view, and navigate through your kitchen designs. You can also view your kitchen design project from front, back, side, top, bottom, right, or left to make adjustments accordingly. Also, you can use tools like rotate, flip, move, select, pan, zoom, etc., to arrange components in your kitchen design.

My Favorite Kitchen Design Software:

SituHome is one of my favorite free kitchen design software. It provides some standard layouts of kitchen with a variety of real brands and products to add to kitchen design. SketchUp Make is another favorite because it lets you draw your own layout of kitchen or import accessories for kitchen to arrange and modify them.

SituHome

SituHome is a free kitchen design software. It provides some kitchen designs like gallery kitchen, open kitchen, standard kitchen, etc. to import and modify. You can fix the size of kitchen area by sliding the walls up to desired length. You can also customize properties of walls (split, hide, and flip wall) like material, roof type, pitch, components, etc.

You can customize each object like cabinets, sink, appliances, gas burner, dishwasher, etc. in the kitchen design. For example, you can change a component to one of its alternatives and choose a desired material (for benchtop, outer shell, etc.). It provides a variety of paints in different colors to design each object of kitchen like dark wood, oak gloss, rustic satin, timber satin, cork, chipboard, and more.

You can create, view, and navigate through your kitchen design in a 3D plane. Along with features like flip object, focus camera on object, etc., it also provides an interesting feature Interact. It lets you view opening of objects to make area adjustment in your kitchen design.

To save a kitchen design, it supports Home File (.home) format only.

SituHome is basically a 3D home design software which provides real brands and products to design a dream home.

SketchUp Make

SketchUp Make is basically a software to design 3D models. You can also use it as a free kitchen design software.

To design a kitchen using SketchUp Make:

Open SketchUp Make, click on ‘Choose Template’. Now, select the template which is for designing a kitchen from the list.

To draw your own layout for a kitchen, it provides various tools like Lines, Arcs, Shapes, Sandbox, Push/Pull (push and pull surface from faces of entities), Paint Bucket, Tape Measure Tool, Rotate, and many more. It provides a Default Tray window which lets you view entity information (layer, area, etc.), select desired style, import components (shelves, fence, frame, tile grid, etc.), select material (metal, pattern, tile, stone, glass, tile, wood, etc.), change shadow properties, and view instructions for designing a kitchen. Furthermore, you can edit edge, face, background, watermark, and modeling settings. It provides a Camera tool to pan, zoom, view (top, front, back, etc.), look around, etc. Other tools to mention are Dimension, Text (normal and 3D), Advanced Camera Tools, Lock/Unlock, etc.

To import a desired kitchen model, go to Window > 3D Warehouse, and search for kitchen models. You can select a desired kitchen model from the list and download it to import to make changes accordingly. You can change placement, size, material, color, style, texture, etc., of the components. You can also use above mentioned tools to add drawings, shapes, text, etc.

To import and export, it supports only SketchUp models in this free version.

Many of the features of SketchUp Pro (paid version) are also available in SketchUp Make for 30 days trial. So, to have better understanding of free features of SketchUp, you can check here.

Using SketchUp Make, you can also create various layouts, home designs, geo-models, furniture designs, landscape architecture, etc. in 3D. You can also checkout video tutorials on its website here.

Sweet Home 3D

Sweet Home 3D is an open source kitchen design software. To design a kitchen, go to Kitchen module and select the desired components to add to your kitchen. It lets you design a kitchen using essential objects like kitchen cabinets, fridge and freezer, dishwasher, cooker, sink, and clothes washer. It provides a separate sections to adjust size of components and to view output kitchen design in 3D. You can modify some other parameters for each component like color and texture, material, location, elevation, etc.

You can create walls, rooms, dimension, add text, add or modify background image, etc. You can also import a 3D model for a furniture piece in OBJ, 3DS, LWS, DAE, KMZ, and ZIP formats. You can work on multiple kitchen designs in different windows at a time.

In this kitchen design software, you can import only Sweet Home 3D format to modify. But, to export a kitchen design, it supports Sweet Home 3D and PDF formats. So, you can save your kitchen design in PDF format too. You can also create and save an image (PNG) and video (MOV) from 3D view of the created kitchen design.

Sweet Home Design is one of the best offline software for home designing. It lets you design various sections and rooms of a house like kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, stair cases, and more.

Blophome

Blophome is an interior design software which can be used to design a kitchen. It provides a ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Modular Kitchen’ catalog, using which you can import kitchen accessories and make a setup for your kitchen. It lets you import objects like base units, drawers, sinks, glass cabinets, tall units, wall racks, wall cabinets, etc. and build your own kitchen design. You can customized each object by changing dimensions, texture, color, rotation angle, finish, etc. You can also use other options to lock/unlock an object’s position. It provides a 3D view to navigate through your kitchen design. You can rotate, pan, zoom in/out, etc. to view your design.

It lets you import only Blophome project (.bph) for editing purpose. You can save kitchen design as a Blophome project in your PC and also, share it through email. You can use Render (realistic/stereo) option in ‘3d project’ menu to save a kitchen design as an image (JPEG).

This kitchen design software also lets you design and decorate various sections of your house. You can make your own setup of a room, decorate it, and create a dream home design.

Planoplan

Planoplan is a free room planner which can be used to design a kitchen. To add components to design kitchen, go to Furniture > Kitchen & Dining > Kitchen Modules. Now, you can add different objects from given catalog to arrange your kitchen accordingly. You can choose 2D or 3D plane to make adjustments to added kitchen modules. After adding modules, you can customize their dimensions, material, color, texture, and also, rotate and flip them.

You can also set general preferences like interface scale, zoom speed, down floor transparency, etc. Also, you can also choose a desired interface language from English, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, German, and Finnish.

Using planoplan, you can create many more interior designs using different module from its catalog, like furniture designing, decorations, lighting, technics, etc.

You can create and save kitchen designs by creating an account its website. It lets you save up to only three projects for free.

Roomon

Roomon is another free kitchen design software which provides a variety of kitchen accessories to make your own setup of a kitchen. You can add different types of objects from the catalog like kitchen cabinets, counters, fridge, oven, sinks, wall racks, exhaust hood, wall shelf, gas cooktop, exhaust pipe, etc. Later, you can customize their dimensions, light settings, and some environment properties.

This kitchen design freeware provides a 3D plane to manage, view, and navigate through a kitchen design project. You can rotate, tilt, roll, and move an object of kitchen design, and place it on the desired position in the kitchen.

It lets you save a project only on your registered account on Roomon.

Roomon is basically a free room designer software which lets you design different rooms of your house. It requires internet connection to create designs.