We believe every home cook deserves a kitchen that works with them, not against them. Learn about our journey, our mission, and the team making it happen.
Kitchen Flow Planner was born in 2020 out of a simple frustration: why do so many kitchens feel chaotic to cook in, even when they look beautiful? Our founder, Eleanor Ashworth, spent years as an interior architect specialising in residential kitchens. She noticed a recurring pattern among her clients. Kitchens that had been expensively designed still left their owners feeling flustered, exhausted, and inefficient when preparing meals.
The problem, Eleanor realised, was not about aesthetics or appliances. It was about movement. Most kitchen designs prioritised how a kitchen looks, not how a person moves through it while cooking. The gap between design and daily reality was enormous. Pots were stored far from the stove, chopping boards lived in the wrong drawer, and the fridge door opened into the main walkway.
Eleanor began documenting these movement inefficiencies and developing practical frameworks that any home cook could apply, regardless of budget or kitchen size. She partnered with her childhood friend, Marcus Chen, a former UX designer who understood the science of workflow optimisation. Together, they launched Kitchen Flow Planner as a free online resource in the spring of 2020.
What started as a simple blog with a handful of articles quickly grew into a comprehensive resource library trusted by over twelve thousand home cooks across the United Kingdom and beyond. Today, Kitchen Flow Planner offers detailed guides, layout analyses, interactive tools, and a growing community of people who have transformed their daily cooking experience through the power of thoughtful organisation.
Every guide, tool, and recommendation we make is grounded in three core values that shape everything we do at Kitchen Flow Planner.
We believe the best kitchen improvements are the simplest ones. Our guides focus on changes you can make today, without hiring a contractor or buying expensive equipment. A well-placed hook or a rearranged drawer can make more difference than a full renovation. We strip away the complexity and give you clear, actionable steps that anyone can follow, whether you are a seasoned cook or just starting out in the kitchen. Simplicity is not about doing less; it is about doing what matters most.
Every recommendation we make has been tested in real kitchens by real home cooks. We do not deal in theory alone. Our principles come from observing hundreds of cooking sessions, timing workflows, and measuring movement patterns. If a tip does not produce a noticeable improvement in your daily cooking routine, we do not publish it. Practicality means our advice works in a studio flat just as well as it does in a spacious country kitchen. Results matter more than ideals.
Kitchen flow should not be a luxury. We are committed to keeping our core resources free and available to everyone. Our guides are written in plain language, free from jargon, and designed to be inclusive of different abilities, kitchen sizes, and budgets. Whether you are a student in a shared house, a busy parent managing family meals, or a retiree looking to make cooking easier on your joints, our resources are designed for you. Great kitchen design should be universal.
A small, dedicated team with a shared passion for making everyday cooking better through thoughtful design.
Eleanor spent fifteen years as a residential interior architect before founding Kitchen Flow Planner. She holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Bath and has designed over two hundred kitchens for homes across southern England. Her frustration with seeing beautiful kitchens fail their owners in practice led her to develop the flow-first approach that underpins everything we do. When she is not sketching kitchen layouts, Eleanor enjoys baking sourdough bread and tending her allotment in Marlborough.
Marcus brings a decade of experience in user experience design to Kitchen Flow Planner. After working at leading tech companies designing intuitive digital interfaces, he became fascinated by the parallels between software workflows and kitchen workflows. Marcus believes that the same principles that make an app easy to use can make a kitchen easy to cook in. He leads the design of our guides, diagrams, and interactive tools. Outside of work, Marcus is an avid home cook who specialises in Sichuan cuisine and homemade pasta.
Priya joined the team in 2022 after completing her PhD in Environmental Psychology at University College London, where she studied how physical spaces affect behaviour and wellbeing. Her academic background gives our content a rigorous, evidence-based foundation that sets it apart from typical home improvement advice. Priya manages all research, writes in-depth guides, and conducts the kitchen observation studies that inform our recommendations. She is a passionate advocate for accessible design and volunteers as a cooking mentor for young people in her community.
From a simple idea to a trusted resource for thousands of home cooks, here is how Kitchen Flow Planner has grown.
Eleanor Ashworth and Marcus Chen launch the website as a free resource with five core articles about kitchen workflow. The initial content covers the work triangle, zone-based organisation, and basic movement principles. Within the first three months, the site attracts over one thousand readers, primarily through word-of-mouth recommendations in cooking communities and social media groups.
We expand our offering with a comprehensive layout gallery featuring detailed analyses of six common kitchen configurations, from galley kitchens to open-plan designs. Each layout includes SVG diagrams, flow assessments, and practical tips. We also publish our first step-by-step guide, which becomes the most-read page on the site and is shared widely across home improvement forums and social media platforms.
Dr Priya Sharma joins as Content and Research Manager, bringing academic rigour to our kitchen observation methodology. She conducts our first formal study, observing thirty home cooks over a period of three months and documenting their movement patterns. The findings inform a major update to our zone-based cooking guide and establish Kitchen Flow Planner as a credible, evidence-based resource in the home improvement space.
Kitchen Flow Planner reaches ten thousand regular readers. We celebrate by releasing our most comprehensive guide yet: the Complete Kitchen Assessment Toolkit. This milestone also marks the launch of our monthly newsletter, which delivers seasonal kitchen tips and reader success stories to a rapidly growing subscriber base of engaged home cooks across the UK.
We introduce interactive features including a kitchen zone calculator and a personalised workflow assessment quiz. These tools allow readers to get tailored recommendations based on their specific kitchen dimensions, cooking habits, and household size. The interactive tools prove enormously popular and double our average time on site, demonstrating that home cooks want personalised, practical advice.
Kitchen Flow Planner partners with several UK-based kitchen retailers and cooking schools to offer workshops and in-person consultations. We launch a community forum where readers share their own kitchen transformations, tips, and before-and-after photographs. The community grows to over three thousand active members, making it one of the most engaged kitchen improvement communities online.
This year, we are focusing on accessibility and inclusivity, developing guides specifically for adaptive kitchens and cooks with mobility challenges. We are also working on a comprehensive video guide series and planning to expand our content to cover outdoor cooking spaces, pantry organisation, and meal-prep workflows. Our goal remains the same: to help every home cook create a kitchen that flows.