Open Shelving in Our New Kitchen

Open shelving in the kitchen is the ultimate convenience to have all of your kitchen items visible and easy-to-grab at all times. Guests can easily find whatever they might need without having to ask you where something is! Read on to see more benefits and how to style open shelving in your kitchen. 

 

Open shelving is a must in our new kitchen because of the narrow layout of the room.  Wall-to-wall closed cabinets made the room feel boxed-in.  Open shelving is the perfect solution to making a narrow kitchen with a galley-like floorpan feel more open.  I love the current open shelving trend and think it will stay around for a long time!  Not only are open shelves aesthetically pleasing but they are extremely practical too!

Today, I am so excited to share with you my new open shelves from Ultra Shelf that we installed in our new kitchen.  I partnered with Ultra Shelf on this project for our remodel because of their amazing reviews and customer service and could not be happier with the way their shelves look in our home!

Open Shelving by Ultra Shelf

Ultra Shelf handcrafts custom floating shelves specific to your needs.  These floating shelf units come in various sizes, wood types, and finishes.  Their collection of solid wood floating shelves are built with furniture grade wood.  The wood has been kiln dried to prevent warping then milled, sanded, and stained or painted for a rich beautiful finish.  All of their shelves come with patent pending Studlock brackets that are hidden inside the shelf giving you a modern clean look to your shelf and will hold 50 pounds for every stud to which it is secured. All of their solid shelves are 1.75″ thick and come in a large range of lengths and depths. Click here to view all the options Ultra Shelf has to offer.

Details About My Open Shelving In Our New Kitchen

I chose the Antique Oak shelves in Nature Stain by Ultra Shelf. They are custom built to 72″ long for the wall in our kitchen and I chose the 1.75″ thickness and 12″ depth.  I find this size to be perfect for displaying a stack of full sized dinner plates and thick cookbooks.  To purchase these exact shelves click here.

Are Open Kitchen Shelves A Good Idea?

Open shelving in the kitchen is a GREAT idea for so many reasons!  The main reason being convenience.  Open shelving provides a place for your plates, bowls, and glasses to be displayed right there in front of you for the taking.  As an added bonus, when guests come over they don’t have to ask you where something is or go rifling through cabinets to find what they need. Open shelving also allows for easy putting away of dishes while unloading the dishwasher. You don’t need to make all of the storage in your kitchen open shelving.  It’s best to use a combination of open shelving and closed cabinets for the ultimate in storage flexibility.  Use closed cabinets to wrangle the clutter and open shelving for daily essentials.

What Do you Put on Open Shelving in a Kitchen?

Open shelving in the kitchen should hold the necessities you use on a daily basis.  Some examples of these items may include plates, cups, bowls, cutting boards, cookbooks, etc.  This way, you can see what you are using on a daily basis and what you are not.  The things you don’t need as daily necessities can be put away in a cabinet and stored for periodic use later.  Commit to keeping things neat on open shelving and display your plates and dishes in an aesthetically pleasing way.

How Deep Should Open Kitchen Shelves Be?

Open shelving in a kitchen should be deep enough to hold a stack of dinner plates which are typically 12″ deep. This is also the perfect minimum depth for displaying cookbooks.  Measure your daily essentials that you plan to display in your kitchen and plan from there.  Typical dinner plates range from 9″-12″.  Open shelving units typically range from 10″-24″.  Mine see here are 12″ deep by     ” long.  I find this to be the perfect depth for dinner plates, large cookbooks, bowls, a set of 6 wine glasses and martini glasses all styled together in a group.

How Do You Decorate Open Kitchen Shelves?

Open shelving is the perfect opportunity to showcase beautiful things.  If you’re like me and get the “itch to switch” quite often, open shelving is the perfect excuse to rearrange things with the changes of the seasons.   Create ever changing vignettes whenever you feel like it that make the perfect “selfies”!  When decorating open shelving, commit to keeping things neat!  If this is hard for you, keep everything one color.  For example, I use all white dishes + all clear glass cups.  Concise, clean, easy, simple.  Everything else that does not fall into this category gets put into a cabinet.

F.A.Q.’s 

• Do your dishes and glasses get dusty?
  • Answer: No, because we purposely only keep things on the shelves that we use on a daily basis.  This in tern means they are constantly rotating on and off the shelf between being used and washed in the dishwasher so they don’t have time to get dusty.  In the future, should I find that this becomes the case, I’ll out these items away in cabinets for later use.
• Are the floating shelves hard to install?
  • Answer: No, they were super easy to install!  Each shelf came with a mounting bracket and hardware specifically made to fit the shelf. Once we found the studs,  everything lined up perfectly and went into the wall exactly how the tutorial video shows.  Click here to watch a tutorial video on how to install these shelves.
• Do you miss having traditional cabinets with doors on that wall of your kitchen?
  • Answer: No, I love having a section of our kitchen walls housing open shelves much more than cabinets because of how much more open that side of the kitchen feels than the section with cabinets.

Hope you’ve enjoyed my review of our new open shelving from Ultra Shelf.  Don’t hesitate to ask any questions in the comments below or send me a DM on Instagram.