Avoid Buying New Kitchen Appliances Until You Answer This Crucial Question

There are usually two speeds to appliance buying. Either some critical element has broken just days before you are set to host some high stakes event and you need a new oven fast, or you can move at the relatively glacial pace of something like a whole elective kitchen suite swap-out. Either way, there is yet one more thing to consider after crucial calculations like price, size, reputation, and warranty: style.

Style, in this case, does not merely refer to the electronic aesthetic of your preference. It refers to the overall style of your entire kitchen, and what will best slot in. If you've just really nailed your kitchen's luxury look or finally broken free from the sad millennial gray that blighted decor for a decade, you probably want to keep it that way — keeping continuity with things that more or less match ensures your carefully curated space stays that way.

You know what goes with everything? Invisibility. Building an invisible kitchen, which really just aims to obscure those pesky "kitchen" pieces that help you store and cook your food, can seem pretty tempting, too. But we'd give it a good few years to see how this trend ages before you really commit. There are more reliable paths in the meantime.

Even if you've kept your kitchen neutral or what you might think of as timeless, there are still plenty of potential products that just won't fit in. If you imagine whatever your idea of neutral is right now, for example, it probably wouldn't make sense to copy and paste some newfangled AI kitchen appliance replete with bleep bleeps and bloop bloops into the picture. This also, obviously, works in reverse. We've all been seduced by the soft curves, fun colors, and pseudo vintage charm of, say, a Smeg. But those faux-backs just don't belong among an otherwise highly modern design schema. If you're sure your own kitchen isn't any more farmhouse cozy as it is chicly minimalist, align it with whatever category is most appropriate and then stay more or less inside those lines. And if that category is truly, powerfully just eclectic, go nuts. If anyone can make a sentient refrigerator get along with a ye olde butter churner, it's you.