Open plan kitchen+dining+living area opinion - with plan!

[CookieDoughKid]

Would like to gauge trusty mumsnet opinion on the attached plan. Hubby wants to increase the open plan kitchen dining area to include a living space (sofas x2 and a TV) and bring this right across at the back of the house. To do this, we'd have to reduce the lounge to 3m x 3m approx (see red lines in plan attached).

He wants a clear line of sight from when the kitchen, so he can see the kids (young teens) eating or sitting watching TV at back of the room.

I think it's a bad idea for 3 reasons

1. It'd be more difficult to resell, people want to have their formal lounges and bigger ones too. Open plan kitchen and dining is a good idea but not living area too.

1. The noise, mess, cooking and smells would be reverb all around the house and it would be hard to get away from it all.

1. I don't think it's a great idea to have a TV in a kitchen dining area but I might just be being prudish.

Currently we have a separate kitchen and dining room and we don't eat in the separate dining room as it's cold, small and poky. Our previous house had kitchen dining open plan and worked fine. We ate in kitchen diner all the time and we had a separate living room. Hubby is swayed by the open space which can look amazing but I think in practise it is not. Thoughts? How do I put a vote on this?

YABU = kitchen dining living area - it IS a good idea
YANBU = it's not a good idea - it is NOT a good idea

I think the plan itself is fine as it is come to think of it.

We’re planing on doing similar (splitting large lounge) but with a different layout but I think with your floor plan I’d leave the lounge as it is.

We did something similar, and I love it. Indeed clear line of sight from kitchen to sofas and TV. Cooking smells are not an issue - we always use the range hood, and with open space, the smells will not be that strong. It's so nice to have this one big light and airy space instead of several small poky rooms.
DC have large bedrooms though, with their own sofas, so in case they want privacy, they can hang with their friends in their own rooms. In case the bedrooms are box rooms, it's probably not doable.

In my opinon, 3x3 lounge would really be too small and cramped. I would personally open it all up to an L-shaped room, but I get that this is not everybody's taste.

Keep lounge the size it is but think about having sliding pocket doors to open this area up into the dining area for those occasions when you have lots of guests.

Turn utility 90 degrees and move into the back of the garage then you have direct access to outside. Brilliant for storing coats and shoes too.

Combine snug and old utility into family/seating area. Possible move the position of the door that goes into the garage (new utility) to give optimum space for large comfy sofa.

Leave it as it is, but turn the dining table round, leaving room for a sofa against the small wall which has the living room behind it (where you have something like a sideboard (?) marked on the plan), with a coffee table or something in front of it.

Quick update and thx for all your suggestions. We are asking developer to cost up glass sliding / Internal doors between kitchen diner to livingroom, and extending livingroom footprint. It will be a single story extension and a small one so shouldn't be a lot (we hope). I'm afraid hubby is adamant he wants a full kitchen diner living space all through so this might be a good (only) compromise.

How do you access your current lounge? Is it hall and through kitchen?

I have a massive L shaped kitchen/dining room/lounge and love it. The kitchen is at the corner, dining area in the short arm and the lounge in the larger part. It’s worked well for our family and is great for parties.

We don’t have another ‘formal' lounge but the kids (who are now older teens) have another room upstairs - originally play room, now mainly for computer games and TV watching. We have another room that could become a formal lounge if a new purchaser wanted to do that.

mummyshark access to lounge via hallway is what I'm going to build in. I think going into lounge via kitchen diner would be tedious!!

womble thanks for the feedback! Very useful. I'll post pictures up on this thread when our house is built of the new layout if you'd like to see?

I’d love to see before and afters! So exciting

I’d leave the lounge and knock the kitchen diner/study/utility into one to add space for a snug area. The house isn’t big enough to have a utility and study, better to have space you will all use. You could also utilise the back of the garage as a utility space - at least you could put the washing machine there.