Help! My big dream kitchen feels like a barn!

[Callipo]

We have just moved into a new house with a big kitchen diner 7.8x 5.5 metres. At one end its got the units and an island and door off to the untilty room. The other end has folding double doors to the garden. This blimmin room is the whole reason we bought the house, as I had these visions of cooking Nigella fishpies whilst the DCs played (quietly with lego LOL - well, in my dreams!)down one end, and then all sitting down together at the vast family dining table. But aaargh! I can't make the layout work..I want enough sofa for five, a big old fashioned eating table, and somehow just cant seem to get the flow right in this big barn-like room... Anyone have a room this size and how have you sorted it?

We looked at a house which had this kind of layout - don't you just put the eating table in the middle, so that you carry things straight from the island over to the table, and then have the sofa in the far end opposite?

Ah - no, I see the problem - you've got double doors at the far end.

I think the table still needs to go in the middle, though.

What are the people supposed to be doing on the sofa? Are they chatting to the people cooking, or watching TV, or what? It will look funny, I think, if one big sofa faces a blank wall, so you could have two smaller sofas facing each other, one against either wall, or a sofa and a couple of chairs?

I would split the part without the units in to two parts, on one side two sofas facing each other, one with its back to the kitchen or 2 sofas at right angles to each other but still one with back to kitchen. On other side the table and chairs.

Are the french windows centred on the wall? If not I would put the sofas on the wider side of the room at right angles so as not to block way out.

OOh callipo - can you post a pic or is it top secret?! Would a corner sofa help with the layout? Finding it a bit hard to picture (am crap at spacial stuff). Also and big rug in the sofa area might help deaden the noise a bit and make it less echoey and cosier. We're hoping to have a kitchen this size and I don't want barn-like either!

You need two sofas facing each other at right angles to the double doors with a big rug in the middle on which the children can play lego.

The table (a nice long thinnish one) needs to then be set at right angles to the sofa.

So if it was zoned it would be kitchen against the back wall, eating across the middle, and relaxing/playing out onto the garden.

I'd lose the island unit. I think they are naff.

Agree will lose the island unit and love the sofas facing each other idea. I think I've given you all the wrong idea - the double french door are not at the end, they are on the long wall(the kitchen runs accross the whole of the back of the house IYSWIM), which I think is why its a problem..

So are double doors opposite kitchen units? Will you always have your back to the room when you are cooking?

Or do you have a 'U' of kitchen units (plus island) at one end of the room, plus another half of the room that has double doors in one of the long sides?

In that case, don't you just put the sofas at right angles to each other, with the rug in between, with one of the sofas facing the double doors and the other facing towards the kitchen units?

Lose the island unit (via ebay or freecycle), and put a big kitchen table in its place.

Grengelsmum you have described it much better than me, and solved the problem I think. The bloody island unit is just a big nuisance and I'm only trying to work it into the plan because , um, they seem to be all the rage at the moment so I keep thinking I must be missing something.. So its going! Anyone want a great big lump of hideous granite work top?

Freecycle is your friend!

Callipo this sounds like mine.I have a huge kitchen {and separate dining room so we don't have to eat in the kitchen}.
The actual cooking bit is all at one end of the kitchen and there was an island which dominated the rest of it.
I took the plunge and got rid of the island , replaced it with a table and made the other end of the room into a sitting area with a sofa.
It now does what I think you have in mind, I can cook while the DC's sit at the table or do homework or someone can sit on the sofa and chat. I am not doomed to domestic isolation.