I’ll be honest: KBB was not the plan for my career. I trained as an interior designer and the first job I landed happened to be in kitchens. One decision by an employer, and here I am, two decades later, still doing kitchens.

The thing is, KBB has often been positioned as adjacent to interior design, rather than central to it. But the work that happens at the level this industry is capable of – the spatial thinking, the material development, the technology integration – is as sophisticated as anything happening in an interior design studio.

We just don’t talk about it like that, and we probably should. Consider the numbers. The 2025 kbbreview Kitchen Market Report indicated that fitted kitchen product sales in the UK had reached almost £5.4 billion per year at end-client buying price. Meanwhile, according to research by IBISWorld, the entire UK interior design industry in 2026 is estimated at £1.9 billion in revenue.

Do the maths. The kitchen sector alone is worth nearly three times the value of the interior design sector. Yet, according to kbbreview’s 2024 retail survey data, 86% of independent kitchen showrooms said professional interior designers made up 15% or less of their customer footfall.

The money is here. The interior designers are not. Most kitchens are delivered by specialised sales designers working directly with homeowners in showroom environments – highly skilled, but operating within a product-based commercial model and typically focused on a single room.

In many cases, there is no broader interior design input at all; the focus is on the kitchen as an isolated purchase rather than as part of a wider spatial whole. Even where interior designers are involved in a project, kitchens are frequently treated as a separate package and handed over to a supplier.

Part of the issue lies in how the disciplines have been framed. Interior design presents itself as a studio-led, consultancy-driven profession. Kitchens, by contrast, are positioned as retail and are closely involved with the trades.

As a result, kitchen design is often perceived as practical and transactional rather than as creative, but that distinction doesn’t hold up because nowadays the kitchen is no longer just a kitchen. It is increasingly a multifunctional space that combines cooking, dining and socialising, and it sets the palette and style that inform the rest of the home.

Designing a kitchen not only requires technical knowledge, it also requires the aesthetic intelligence that sits at the heart of every interior design project. And yet, KBB remains conspicuously absent from interior design education.

When the room commanding the largest spend in a client’s budget is also the room least likely to be taught to interior designers, we have a structural problem. This is why I joined the British Institute of Interior Design and became regional ambassador for the North and North West. I argue for the inclusion of KBB within the interior design profession as a core design discipline.

KBB has earned its seat at the interior design table. It’s time the industry gave it one.