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It’s all too easy to let small kitchen appliances take over your counter space. Even if you frequently use your air fryer or coffee maker, they can still make kitchen counters look cluttered and reduce your available space for food prep and other cooking-related tasks.
Luckily, an appliance garage can help solve this problem. Much like a regular garage keeps your car protected and out of sight, appliance garages offer similar benefits for your kitchen. They work to declutter kitchen countertops by providing a convenient place to store small appliances.
There are several different design options to pick from, including freestanding appliance garages, ones that are built into cabinets, and corner pieces that can be added to an existing kitchen layout. Find inspiration for your own kitchen appliance garage below.
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1. Lifting Door
A lifting appliance garage door allows for easy access to frequently-used kitchen appliances. This style also keeps the door out of the way, allowing you to simply slide the appliance forward for use. Then, once you’re done using it, just push it back into its place and pull the door down to keep your counters clear and clutter-free.
2. Spacious Shelves
The size of an appliance garage cabinet can be customized to match your specific storage needs. If you have multiple small appliances—such as a coffee maker, toaster, and blender—that you want to keep hidden, consider a multitiered cabinet.
A carefully designed cabinet with shelves can provide sufficient space to keep all of your essentials where you can easily reach them. It can also provide space to store additional items, such as mugs for a hideaway coffee bar.
3. Corner Appliance Garage
If you’re buying new cabinets, consider making the most of corner space with this Rockler appliance garage kit. The kit features a tambour roll-up door that stays out of the way to let you move your appliances in and out of the space with ease. After you’re finished working, quickly clean up the counter by placing the appliance back in the garage and closing the door.
4. Under-Cabinet Hideaway
Small appliances stored along the back of the counter can make a kitchen look messy. Adding a countertop appliance garage beneath a set of cabinets allows you to take advantage of this convenient storage space while also ensuring that your small appliances don’t take away from the clean and put-together look of your kitchen when they’re not in use.
5. Accessible Appliances
An appliance garage can also help you create an accessible kitchen station for homes with one or more household members who use a wheelchair or prefer to sit while they work. This appliance garage opens to reveal a baking station that sits at just the right height for use in a seated position. When the door is opened, the countertop drawer pulls out to create a comfortable workspace.
6. Hidden Mixer
Stand mixers are indispensable for baking, but they are bulky, heavy, and take up a lot of countertop space. Their larger size also makes it difficult to store them in a lower cabinet. With an appliance cabinet, you can keep a stand mixer on the counter where it will be ready when you need it, but also out of sight when it’s not in use.
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7. Room for Two
One of the benefits of appliance garages is that they can be customized to match your specific storage needs. Consider the layout of your kitchen and how many small appliances you’d like to conceal. Then decide on the ideal dimensions for your appliance garage. While this example is wide enough to comfortably fit a toaster and coffee maker, your kitchen’s appliance garage can be whatever size your cooking needs call for.
8. Triple Decker Garage
Why settle for just one appliance garage when you can have three? A multilevel garage offers additional space to store your must-have appliances and other essentials that you’d prefer to have on hand. If you integrate the design of your garage into a corner, you could even integrate dual-access doors to make grabbing the specific tool you need easier.
9. Compact Appliance Garage
Even if you have a smaller kitchen and don’t have extra countertop or cabinet space to give up, you’ll find that there are several appliance garage ideas that could work. One idea is to mount a more compact garage beneath one of the cabinets without taking away from the counter space beneath it. This more compact appliance garage won’t fit larger appliances, like an air fryer or stand mixer. However, it could help keep other items—such as smaller appliances, sugar bowls, or coffee canisters—from cluttering your countertops.
10. Bifold Door
Another idea is to integrate a countertop storage cabinet into your design when you’re buying new kitchen cabinets. With a folding door, the door can open fully to leave you plenty of counter space to work and use a toaster, coffee maker, or other small appliances. Once closed back up, the sliding door can look nearly identical to the cabinet doors above it for a cohesive look.
11. Double-Door Garage
A kitchen appliance cabinet offers sufficient space to hold a large toaster and coffee maker. The double doors open and slide back into the cabinet to provide ample space for cooking or preparing food. With the garage’s location at the back of the counter under the cabinets, it provides an integrated look with the rest of the cabinetry.
12. Sizeable Storage
If you’re installing your own kitchen cabinets, look for some appliance garage hardware that will convert one of the doors to open and tuck away beneath the cabinet above it. This will provide you with easy access to your most used appliances—such as a blender, food processor, or slow cooker. When closed, this door design can blend in seamlessly with the rest of the cabinetry in your kitchen to keep your small appliances hidden.
13. Hidden Shelves
A modern appliance garage coordinates nicely with a modern kitchen. In this example, the appliance garage offers three shelves, with the bottom shelf offering space to accommodate a coffee and cappuccino maker. When you’re ready to make your morning cup of coffee, simply open the doors, slide them back out of the way, and you have a ready-to-go coffee station. With the additional shelves, you can store mugs, coffee tins, tea bags, sugar, and other necessities.
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