7 Ways to Make Your Small Apartment Kitchen a Little Bit Bigger

published Feb 10, 2015

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Has your teeny tiny kitchen got you down? Maybe you barely have enough prep space to make meals for one, or your dishes and pots are overflowing your one lonely cabinet. But you don’t have to live this way. Even for apartment dwellers, there are plenty of ways you can expand the footprint of a teeny tiny kitchen. Here are 7 ideas.

(Image credit: Liana Hayles Newton)

Pictured up top is the home of 100 Layer Cake co-creator Amanda Dawnbarn, featured on The Glitter Guide. Her kitchen might be a little bigger than yours, but if you have the same L-shaped configuration, you can do the same thing she did: add an island that provides extra work space, extra storage, and a place for friends to sit and chat while you’re making a meal. This can also work in a kitchen oriented along one wall of a larger room, as seen in Mark’s Delightful (and Delicious!) West Village Home.

(Image credit: Lisanne van de Klift)

A slightly higher table, in this kitchen from Lisanne van de Klift, provides a sort of demarcation between the living room and the kitchen, and also a breakfast bar and a spot to stash things while you’re cooking.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

I love this solution from a small Brooklyn apartment spotted on IKEA Family Live. What the residents have done is essentially extend their small, one-wall kitchen into a complete ‘room’ by adding storage on the opposite wall, and a table and chairs in between. Since the table is right smack dab in the middle of the kitchen, it’s as useful for prep space as it is for dining.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

In this kitchen from The Style Files, the homeowners stretched their kitchen with a table and some wall-mounted shelves to the left of the fridge.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Another way to do this is with rolling industrial shelving. It can look especially nice in a minimal, modern kitchen, as seen on The Style Files.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

For their 440 square foot New York apartment, Hani and Andrew came up with a simple but clever solution — they added some wall mounted shelving to the left of the breakfast bar, which creates a ‘pantry’ just outside the kitchen, and relieves some of the pressure on their existing cabinets.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Most of the ideas above will only work for someone whose kitchen is part of a larger room, but this space from Huh Magazine showcases a solution that will work for any kitchen: a wall-mounted table that folds out to provide a little extra workspace, or seating for friends, whenever you may need it.