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| YOU AND YOURS
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| JEFF HOWELL'S TOP TIPS FOR BUYING A NEW KITCHEN |
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 People spend thousands on a
new kitchen. Television chef
Anthony Worrall Thompson
showed me around his
recently, at his home near
Henley on the banks of the
Thames. He’d knocked
together two cottages to
make enough room for it
and cheerfully showed me
some of the gadgets he had.
“Most men tend to buy fast cars for their ego extensions, I buy cookers. It was built by a French company and could cater for about 50 people. As a TV chef it would be an embarrassment to have an unsightly kitchen.”
And it appears that’s the way many of us feel about the kitchen – it is the heart of the home and therefore deserves plenty of attention, and often plenty of money.
That’s what led Simon Schilder and Claire Louise-Whiley to update their south London flat. They bought a kitchen from high-street chain Magnet, thinking that a high-street name would mean trouble-free installation. “The delivery eventually did happen in the run-up to Christmas then we didn’t see the fitters for another week. We didn’t realise until too late that it was being fitted by sub-contractors.” Buy a kitchen from a high street store, and you might expect that store to install it.
At You & Yours we carried out a survey of Britain’s biggest kitchen suppliers. Between them they supply the majority of kitchens in the UK. All of them sub-contract the installation. So how do you buy high street kitchen and fit it reliably? Mike O’Leary is a carpenter. He’s built kitchens for clients, and not just hand-made ones like AWT’s. “People come along to me and sometimes it’s a made to measure kitchen for which I’ll go to the wholesalers, buy the material take it to the joiner shop and make everything up. Most of the kitchens from the big names are very good nowadays.” Mike has a checklist of what to look for in a quality kitchen: 18mm carcass timber rather than thinner 15mm steel draw runners plywood drawer bottoms and real wood doors.
A kitchen might not add as much value to your home as you may think warns Chartered Surveyor Stephen Bonniface: “It depends how much you want to spend. You can spend £5,000 in a high street store and recover that kind of money. You can spend £20-25,000 on the same kind of kitchen and never get that back.”
But many kitchens never need replacing in the first place. They are often ripped-out in the name of fashion or on grounds of taste. However, it’s possible to change the look of a kitchen at a fraction of the cost by simply changing cupboard doors and worktops.
The UK’s main kitchen suppliers surveyed by You & Yours: B&Q, Focus Wickes, MFI, Ikea, Magnet
Kitchen Specialists Association
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