open plan vs close the door kitchen

[Tournesol]

Hello,

I am tying myself in knots with kitchen decisions and hoped for some wisdom from MN as been searching old kitchen threads and got so much good advice!

My question in short is will we regret knocking through from our kitchen to the dining room to make it open plan?

The background:
We have a late 1970s house with the original, awful country cottage style kitchen (complete with fake beams!). At the moment there is a hatch from the kitchen into the dining room through which I can peer at the children and pass them food etc.

At the moment this set up works cos the kids are only 6, 3 and 2 so the dining room is actually their playroom (they also eat in there off the table underneath my handy hatch).

We have been trying to future proof the house as this will probably the one and only time we do the kitchen so we initially thought we should think about when the playroom becomes a dining room how much better it would be to be open plan and to have a long worktop dividing the kitchen and dining room.

However the cost of doing this is getting a bit silly, what with walls coming down, moving doors, buying metres and metres of worktop. So then I thought maybe we should just keep layout as it is as kitchen is a decent size.

What are you experiences? Will I regret not going open plan? Sorry for such a long post!

I have a very small kitchen that is separate from the living area and I was fine with that for ages (preferred it in some ways) but we are now remodelling the whole place to get a kitchen-diner. My children are slightly older than yours (9,7,5) and they want to join in with cooking or just want to chat and there isn't room; we also have more friends round now they're a bit bigger and I find myself stuck in the kitchen while everyone else is enjoying themselves. I tend to find that the children's default position is to watch TV or play on my laptop while I am in the kitchen whereas if I could sit them down the table in a kitchen-diner, I would have more control over them doing homework etc.

If kitchen is a decent size can you put a small table in there?

I wish I had a door on my kitchen most when the washing machine is on.

I used to have a kitchen diner, it was a fab family room. We cooked, ate, hung washing, did homework, spent much of the day in there.

A couple of weeks ago we moved to a house with a separate kitchen and dining room. We all prefer the separate set-up. The dining room is really peaceful, we can close doors and not hear the washing machine or dishwasher. The kitchen is just for cooking which I love but I do have the option of having a small table in there if I wish. We also have a seperate utility room which means no tripping over washing in the kitchen. I wouldn't go back to open plan.

Thanks for the responses so far, all food for thought.

The kitchen is quite big but quite an odd shape so no room for a table in the kitchen.

Also if it makes any difference our sitting room and conservatory are both sort of open plan ish off the dining room/playroom so if I had open kitchen too it would be a lot of open!

Veering towards keeping it closed now...

You could try something semi-open maybe? Like separate rooms but with a good flow between them. Or maybe make that hatch bigger and turn it into a feature to get a feeling of space.

We also deliberated over this. Eventually we went ahead and it's become one big lovely kitchen/diner, with a tv and some bar stools at the breakfast bar (which acts as a room divider as well). We also blocked in a wall of glazed doors connecting to the sitting room as we felt it would be too open plan. So now we have two big rooms, which are seperate.

Open plan kitchens can and do change the way you live. However, some important points worth noting-

You should have a separate utility room. Its very unsightly to have laundry appliances and baskets visible in the kitchen.

You need to buy the quietest appliances you can afford. Nothing's worse than trying to have a conversation with the swish of a dishwasher in the background.

Good quality extraction to remove grease and odours effectively.

We are just doing this. In our old house, we had open plan everything – lounge and dining room were already knocked into one long room when we moved in, and we knocked through between kitchen and dining room. Had twin toddlers at the time and it worked very well. Lots of space for them to toddle, play, lots of family over all the time etc. Definitely a social way of living.

Eventually though, the benefit of being complete open plan began to fade as toys / plastic / bits of lego seemed to multiply, and as they got older. Felt I could never really relax when the children were in bed because I was still looking at plastic-tastic tat littering the lounge. Despite my best efforts, the whole house generally looked like a bomb had hit it. Also, had 3 children by this time – all wanting to do something different in effectively one space.

Having said all that, we are now knocking through between the kitchen & dining room, but I wouldn't go completely open plan. Like you, we have a relatively good sized kitchen, but again, slightly odd lay out with internal & external doors, and very large chimney breast. We have a small extendable table in there pushed up against the wall where we eat (as a family – slightly cramped but it does the job) and a similar set up in the dining room – in that it is the play room / 2nd reception room really with sofa / games etc although we do have a large dining table in there too (its quite a decent size – about 14' x 12'). However, we do also have a separate utility room and a separate lounge (which is kind of the quiet / grown up tidy and nicely decorated space). My children are 8, 8 and 4 now and the drive for us is very similar to you – more family time and more social.

I think if your current dining room is already open to the sitting room I would leave as is. I'm not a big fan of completely open areas as you can see the tat more easily and it's nice to have a separate room to retire to after the evening meal.
If you do open it up I would agree with what has been said up thread, separate utility so no noisy laundry.

We find that being able to close the door on the kitchen whilst cooking - especially when steaming veggies, goes a long way to reducing condensation in the rest of the house. The rest of the time the doors are open.

If it was a choice - I would not choose a kitchen that can't be isolated from the rest of the house. We have a kitchen diner, which is great.

After having various set ups since having dc 1 nine years ago, I have finally worked out the best set up after having moved to Australia (where separate kitchen does not exist!) and having dc3.

One big open plan kitchen /diner /living space and all adult focussed other than baby mat and toys which can be easily put away (obvs baby needs to be where can be seen!) Then a separate playroom for kids so all the toys and noise can be contained between there and kids bedrooms!

Separate laundry. Also main space needs to be big so you dont feel you are in the kitchen and needs to be some kind of island effect to separate kitchen from dining/living.

Thanks for all the advice! It is really helpful to see some other people's experience.

I think I have decided to leave the kitchen separate as the house flows nicely at the moment and I like to be able to shut away the kitchen smells, mess and sound.

Also the open plan nature of sitting room and playroom is a great family space and I think if I added the kitchen into the open plan mix it would end up getting filled with toys and children, instead of being my little kitchen of calm!

I think I just got carried away with having to really jazz things up but actually I just want a new kitchen, not a new layout.

I have a similar dilemma. We are in the process of thinking about a new kitchen and I was toying with knocking through from the dining room to the kitchen. Our kitchen is already a good size and we have a utility room at the back. One option is to knock through the dining room to kitchen which would create a massive space (probably bit too big to be honest). The other option is to knock through the wall from kitchen to utility to open up the back of the house and create a lot more light with bi-folding or patio doors (our kitchen is fairly dark). This would create a kitchen space of 10ft x 20ft which is a really decent size. But then would lose the benefit of all unsightly stuff hidden away.

The other factor is that our living room on the other side of the hallway already runs from front to back so if we did the same on the other side I think it would be too open. But at the moment our dining room is wasted space. It has a dining table in which we use very sporadically and other than that is used as a dumping ground.

We are lucky in that we already have a decent size table in the kitchen as it is so I know that we can definitely have the main dining table in there.