Create Your Dream Kitchen Space

This post is brought to you by Topps Tiles.

The ideal kitchen is a well-designed room that offers plenty of space to be creative with cooking, with enough storage to ensure a place for every essential. It is a welcoming, inspiring place that reflects its user's personality.

The traditional kitchen can be created using simple colours and textures to achieve a homey feel: white classic wall tiles and coordinating white surfaces can be paired with terracotta floor tiles for a 'country cottage' look that is fresh, airy and - thanks to the tiles - easy to keep clean. Check out places like www.toppstiles.co.uk for ideas. 

When choosing accessories such as a kettle, a toaster or utensil holders, go for brightly coloured options to bring an extra uplifting element to the room.

Keep window dressings to a minimum to allow as much daylight as possible to enter, making the room even more welcoming. Low-hanging pendulum lights or a rustic-looking chandelier set over a pale wood or white dining table will give a gorgeous glow to lazy evenings spent dining and entertaining.

A modern kitchen can be the most colourful room in the home, with a wall of multi-coloured tiles as its main focal point and bright bar stools set around a breakfast bar. Choose a plain floor tile - in white or cream perhaps - to balance out the eye-catching walls.

A modern kitchen calls for the super-sleek gadgets, so place bright coffee machines, knife blocks, or blenders in pride of place on kitchen surfaces.

While colourful kitchen units and surfaces are available, a great alternative is to fill in the wall space above them with brightly-coloured mosaic tiles to inject personality into the room.

Whichever style of décor is chosen, any kitchen can be re-vamped with a few simple changes. New floor tiles, for example, can lift the whole kitchen, making it appear cleaner and fresher, or they can change its theme completely. Installing task lighting can make a kitchen much easier to work in, and atmospheric lighting such as that from a chandelier can create a much more welcoming environment.