The kitchen can look wonderfully tidy at noon and become impossible at six. Put away the shopping, get out a chopping board, start the rice cooker, and suddenly the missing surface has a very specific job.
Count the shortage you actually have
Before drawing a pantry, empty the cupboards that would disappear. On a Willowdale kitchen, we put the contents on the dining table and found three roasting pans, a bread maker, and rather less food than the owners expected. The everyday groceries fitted into the existing storage once the occasional equipment moved. A tall cupboard would have hidden the same problem behind a taller door.
Now measure one uninterrupted preparation area with the normal countertop residents still in place. Do not mentally relocate the coffee machine to an imaginary utility room. If that clear area is the scarce thing, protect it.
Try one ordinary shopping day
Use a box on the existing counter to represent the pantry footprint, clear of appliances, heat, and food preparation. Leave it there through an ordinary shopping day. In that kitchen, the proposed pantry took the spot where grocery bags landed; dinner prep then moved across the room. We kept the worktop and put shallow pull-outs below it. The bread maker still needed a separate home, which was a better compromise than losing the only useful chopping area.
A narrow pantry plus a useful preparation run may beat a dramatic wall of doors. Equally, a household that bulk-buys and mostly cooks at an island may benefit much more from the tall storage. The right answer follows the routine.
Choose the inside before the door
IKEA Canada's pantry organization guidance shows pull-out and grouped storage options. Assign the actual food and equipment before approving the doors. If keeping the counter wins your shopping-day test, the next useful question is what goes underneath it: deep drawers or base-cabinet doors can make a surprisingly different kitchen out of the same footprint.