Gloss White Kitchens – A Quick Guide

Ultra Modern Touch Gloss White With Beautiful Curved Island

The Gloss White Kitchen is perhaps the ultimate in contemporary design. The bright clean lines are the main attraction, but for a lot of people the percieved lack of colour can ultimately disuade them from going for the ‘look’.

The main concerns are usually:

• Which colour worktops will go best?
• What type of worktop i.e. granite, Corian, Laminate, blockwood, Encore etc
  
• Are their different gloss finishes?
• Will it cost more than your normal kitchen?

Worktops

The obvious choice are black granite worktops like the image on the left, because of the simple nature of the contrast. Black & white works because you can introduce any other colour without any clashing issues. Of course, this is not to say that that any other colours won’t work, you just need to plan further ahead with the decor for the rest of the kitchen.

With wood and laminate finishes, current trends at the minute are to have a dark walnut or wenge finish tops. With laminates bamboo style finished are becoming more popular as well.

As for Corian, the very dark colours are not recommended for kitchens as they show up scratches quite clearly, but the mixed colours such as Burnt Amber are fine and the new pastel shades of Corian would look stunning on a gloss white surface.

When is A Gloss Finish not a Gloss Finish?

Their are more than one type of gloss finish for a kitchen door. The most common ones on the market are (in order of lowest cost first):

1. Melamine
2. Vinyl (PVC)
3. Acrylic
4. High Gloss Lacquer

Which is the best? Well, as with most things in life this depends on your budget and expectations. Generally the more glossy the finish the higher the cost. Most doors on the market are either Melamine or PVC.

Melamine is the lowest cost type of door and as a result is the least glossy. PVC is probably the most common on the market at the moment and has the main benefit of being able to ‘wrap’ around the door giving a seamless finish i.e the door does not need to be edged.

If you want a finish that is like glass then you need to go for either acrylic or lacquer.

Acrylic doors are literally sheets of acrylic (commonly known as Perspex) fixed to an MDF door. This does give a finish like a piece of glass and will look fabulous. Naturally the price of these doors will be more than PVC, but the finish is noticeably better.

Crown Imperial Gloss White Acrylic Door

Lacquered doors create a finish that is close to glass, by painting MDF doors very much in the same way that a car is painted: A colour undercoat finished with a lacquer to give a deep gloss finish.

Which one you choose is, of course, up to you.  At AK fitted Interiors we are able to offer you all of them across all of our brands of Keller, Sheraton, Chippendale, Crown and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, not only in white, but also in a vast array of colours.

For more information please visit www.akfittedinteriors.co.uk