Small Cool Kitchens

Apartment Therapy’s biggest event of the year, Small Cool 2011 just wrapped, and the winners were announced. It was a complete festival of inspiring compact homes this year — nearly 200 entries from teeny-tiny to small. We took this as an opportunity to dig through this year’s entries and pull out the most inspiring small kitchens. From sleek, all-white modern kitchens to simple and homey spaces, here are 30 small kitchens to inspire.

Just because it’s old school doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

For a long time, galley kitchens have gotten a bad rap as the most undesirable layout. And while they tend to be more on the snug side compared to other designs, they’re not all that bad. For one, they make it easy to hide your mess (you can’t say the same for covetable open-concept kitchens!). They also hold the potential for lots of smart storage. If you happen to be the proud (or not-so-proud?

Our Small Cool Kitchens contest wrapped up this week. Did you enjoy it? We always love this contest because it gives us a unique snapshot of what’s going on in kitchens around the country (and world!). This year, we were reminded of a few trends that aren’t dying anytime soon, some tips to make small kitchens the best they can be, and one hot new color we see hitting it big in the next year.

Small Cool Kitchens is our annual celebration of the hardworking kitchens around the world where real people cook, live, and celebrate joyful meals with their friends and family. This year was perhaps the best and most inspiring collection of modest and lovely kitchens we’ve seen yet, and I know I was personally quite inspired by all the great ideas peppered throughout the entries.

The ballots are in! Over the past week, our clever judges Steve, Matt, and Amanda and Merrill voted on your choices for the top 5 kitchens in each category. After counting their votes, reading their comments, checking our tallies (and checking them again!) here, without further ado, are the finalists for the Small Cool kitchen of the year!

The submission portion of our Small Cool Kitchens 2013 contest may be over, but the fun is just beginning! Now we’re into full-on voting mode, and it’s up to you to decide which five kitchens from each division will go on to our judges. Have you looked at all the entries? There are some great ones you won’t want to miss. Click through the slideshow to see all the entries posted from Week 2, and then vote for your favorite!

Small Cool Kitchens 2013 is in full swing! We’ve already seen some great entries from the first week. Read on to see them all and vote for your favorite!Have you entered your kitchen yet? There’s less than a week left to enter, and we’ve got some great prizes for our four finalists and one grand prize winner. Our friends at Cuisinart, Le Creuset, Edgeware, SodaStream, and Staub have helped us put together packages of terrific kitchen tools.

Well-thought-out houseboat kitchens have plenty of ideas you could steal for your own kitchen — even if it's just in a regular house, far away from water.

We’ve been introducing you to our judges in the finalist round of Small Cool Kitchens 2013. Today, meet our final panel judge: Matt Armendariz of Mattbites! Matt writes one of my long-time favorite food blogs. He is a pro photographer, writer, and terrific cook who lives and blogs in Southern California. I’ve always loved his sense of humor and vibrant photography. When I found out that he had just finished renovating a home too, I knew he would be a great addition to our panel!

A common mistake when decorating a small space is to assume that everything in it should be equally tiny. But when the furniture, the wall art, and even the rugs are little, the whole room risks feeling itsy-bitsy. Time to think bigger: Introduce just one large-scale statement piece (like the seven stylish rooms that follow) to pull the room together and amp up its style. Note: While these photos don’t always show kitchens or dining rooms, they’ll work for those spaces, too!

Some people can live together in just 200 square feet of space. And they can do it beautifully, too. Just look at this Airstream trailer, which is home to Natasha Lawyer and Brett Bashaw. Nicknamed the Tin Can Homestead, it’s a marvel of smart, stylish storage. Here are seven smart storage ideas you should steal from their functional-yet-small kitchen and implement in your own tiny space.

When you have minimal counter space to prep, work, and cook on, every square inch is precious. Take it from a New Yorker who once prepped a Thanksgiving turkey on the kitchen floor, while chopping mirepoix in the sink and stacking hot bakeware, mixing bowls, and several pounds of potatoes on one square foot of Formica. While this 930-square-foot Austin home has a decent amount of counter space, creative uses of vertical and horizontal space in the kitchen maximize the cooking surfaces available.

The “before” kitchen in this Upper West Side two-bedroom wasn’t in terrible condition, but it was plagued by a few issues common to small kitchens: teeny-tiny appliances, and a serious lack of cabinet and counter space. The dark finishes and awkward, chopped-up blocks of cabinets made the small space seem even smaller. The owners, a newly married couple, envisioned a lighter, more streamlined kitchen that would bring a fresh new look to the public spaces of their apartment.

Feeling confined by the limits of your tiny kitchen? Well, we’re here to tell you that the limits do not exist! All you have to do to improve your tiny kitchen? Master the art of optical illusion! It’s actually pretty easy. Here are a few ways to maximize your space and make your kitchen feel a million times larger than it actually is — try them on for size. If you absolutely need to put more stuff in your tiny space, consider going the acrylic route.

America’s fascination with unconventional living arrangements (ahem, tiny homes) is showing no signs of slowing down. It used to be that the only time I ever came across a tiny home was while watching HGTV, but nowadays you can press a few buttons and buy your very own on Amazon. It’s wild. Perhaps the reason we can’t get enough of tiny homes is because everyone has the same single question on their minds about them: How do people store all their stuff?

Forgoing conventional living arrangements in favor of life on the road in an RV requires a hefty dose of romanticism, and it takes a special sort of someone to really do it right. In this particular case, the special someone(s) are Elyse DeLisle and Amanda Goelz, a creative couple who just last year decided to scrap plans to close on a condo in Florida and instead travel the country in a renovated 1986 Fleetwood Avion that they found on Craigslist.

I have watched a lot of HGTV. From House Hunters to Fixer Upper, I’ve listened to way too many soon-to-be homeowners describe their dream properties. Everyone wants character and charm, updated bathrooms, hardwood floors, and an open kitchen. I’m with them until this last item — I’m 100 percent Team Galley Kitchen.

There are only so many changes you can make to a kitchen you do not own. Jess Bunge, Senior Market Editor for Emily Henderson, faced many of the classic challenges of a rental — dated floors, lackluster countertops, an oddly shaped floor plan — but brilliantly worked around them to make the space one to sigh over. The real star of this new kitchen is the countertop cover. With help from her dad, Jess cleverly cut plywood to fit over the gray granite, and built a matching backsplash.

In any home, large or small, storage issues tend to be among the top gripes. There’s a good chance that your basement — if you even have a basement — is filled with needless items that you’ve collected over the years. You’ve probably lived through the experience of donating several small appliances, so you can, um … make room for new small appliances. And let’s not even discuss the clutter in that kitchen drawer.

Our friends over at Apartment Therapy ran this adorable House Tour, which they called “the most livable tiny house” they’ve ever seen. They weren’t exaggerating. The whole space is only 160 square feet, and yet it actually seems like something we might all be able to live in (not together, obviously). It feels so possible because the place is very thoughtfully laid out and organized — especially the kitchen.

Erika‘s kitchen used to be dark, drab, and crowded. Even though she couldn’t make any major changes to the layout, she was able to give the kitchen a bright and stylish new look that created the sense of oodles more space. Keep reading to see how. From Erika: The original kitchen of our 1950s split-level house in the Oakland Hills was remodeled by the previous owner to simply sell the house.

When it comes to small spaces, the natural reaction is to pare stuff down as much as possible. There’s no room for duplicates, broken gadgets, or anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. And while that’s certainly the right impulse, less is not always more. Just look at this kitchen, which belongs to Stella Blackmon, an editor over at Cup of Jo.

Yesterday we announced our 10 semi-finalists in Small Cool Kitchens 2013First up: Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs of Food52 and the just-launched Provisions. They recently moved in to a new office, where they installed a beautiful new kitchen for testing recipes and taking photos. Here are their thoughts on their shared kitchen space. 1. What’s your favorite feature in the kitchen?

Yesterday we showed you the first round of awesome small kitchens from Apartment Therapy’s Small Cool Contest, which just recently finished up. (See the winners here!) Haven’t had your fill of impressive small spaces yet? That’s good, because we have 20 more kitchens for you today! More colors, more storage ideas, more smart solutions for small kitchens of all kinds.

Who cooks here? Travis and JessLocation: Washington, D.C.Owned or rented? OwnedKitchen size: 70 square feet What challenge have you overcome in your kitchen? Houseboat life has no shortage of challenges — have you ever tried to sauté something at sea? — but fortunately these are greatly outweighed by the rewards! The boat is from 1986 and the décor hadn’t been updated at all since then, and cabinet and counter space is minimal.

Who cooks here? Nik and JohnLocation: San Francisco, CAOwned or rented? RentedKitchen size: 60 square feet What challenge have you overcome in your kitchen? We added counter space by adding a stainless steel shelving unit for our microwave and toaster oven which also cleverly hides the gas line to the oven. We also put in some shelving units for plates and pots.