French/sliding doors between kitchen and dining room

[Theknittinggorilla]

We are very undecided on whether to take out the wall between our kitchen and dining room. Dining room is lovely big square room and think having it separate will be useful when kids are older (currently 3 under 5). But kitchen will not be quite big enough with a table in if we don't knock through, and we would have to lose a boot room/utility.
(Have separate lounge and upstairs laundry).

Thinking about having internal French doors or pocket doors between the two rooms. Then could have island/breakfast bar in kitchen and table, sofa and doors to garden in dining room. Would keep them open most of time but option to close if having people for dinner/kids doing separate things. Would also allow us to have different flooring in each room (would like to keep original boards in dining room but not sensible in kitchen)

Is this a terribly old fashioned idea? Would it put you off buying a house, is a big kitchen diner more desirable?

Doors would be this kind of thing...

What was the cost of your doors please dynevoran? They're lovely, and exactly what I want in our house.

Love your doors dynevoran I want them!

dynevoran they look great can I ash where you bought them?

*ask

In our old house we had wooden doors with parliament hinges so they folded flat back as PigletJohn said and looked "right" for a period house - definitely not twee as they were the same doors as everywhere else.
But we always kept them open so this time we've just knocked right through - the whole space feels much more open and spacious but best of all it change the quality of the light and the whole room is brighter than either individual room was because of light coming through from different angles.

The all in cost of ours was about £750 for the sliding mechanism and the doors to be cut and painted and for the coving along the top which covers the mechanism.

The installation costs and the costs of the stud wall I can't advise as they were part of general labour and materials costs of the extension.

I remember the company did tracks for either glass or timber doors. With the timber mechanism it seemed you could make the doors out of whatever you want. Ours are just MDF painted and edged with a reinforced strip. You can use glass (I think the track is slightly different) or plywood etc we just went for a budget version as were running out of money but may get some nice oiled high grade Baltic Birch plywood ones made in future.

The track was (I think) from a company called Glass Door Solutions (Glassdoor solutions.co.uk) in Bow in East London.

Also for ours there is no floor track so you can have interrupted flooring. We expected to have a track in the floor as had been considering other track systems for bifolds so had left a gap in the flooring for the track. When we didn't need it this meant we have a bodged bit between the two rooms where there is a strip running across the herringbone which at the time was annoying but now it's grown on me and I like the fact it creates a subtle transition between the two spaces. (Pic attached) But something to plan more in advance if you're in planning stages now!

We have French doors between our kitchen and big living/dining areas. They fold almost flat against the walls when open so there's a large archway between the two rooms whenever they're open; but we have the sapce in the living/dining area to fold them back, if you see what I mean? I love them - they have smoked glass so let the light through but you can't see through and make perfect sense when I want to get on with some cooking without being distracted from the living area. I hated the idea of open plan kitchen/living/dining area as I liked being able to separate off kitchen mess/smells/sounds and this works perfectly for me.

We designed open spaces between the kitchen and the lounge (2.5m) and the kitchen and the hall (1.5m - huge hall, more like two rooms) and it works well. We thought about french doors but they look rather 80s. We thought about glass doors. Do we miss doors? Not at all. We have light everywhere and why have something I would never close?

I love the Crittal doors though and if I needed to zone, I would have these! We have doors to the study and family room, downstairs cloakroom and landry room. Everything else is partially open but we do have lots of space.