As mentioned in Part 1, I’m going to focus Part 2 on a handful of open kitchens that were crafted from existing homes, and in all five cases smaller homes with a warren of separated rooms. As you may have surmised, you can’t have an open kitchen without an open plan, so the first task with such remodeling projects is to create an open plan for the kitchen, living, and dining to reside.
In virtually all remodeling projects of smaller homes your objective is to make an existing small home live large. Due to limited budgets and limited lots the deliberate choice in these projects was to maintain the existing footprint and in all but one case work within the existing envelope to lessen the cost and impact of new construction. And in all projects we kept the existing foundations to limit the carbon footprint of our work.
To create an open plan you pretty much always start by tearing down walls and adding windows and doors to the existing envelope. This starts with an analysis of the existing structure by a structural engineer to determine which walls you can tear down and what openings you can cut into the exterior walls so that the house doesn’t collapse. The more you understand here the more elegantly you can carve out your new space. Pretty much anything is possible in this regard but the key here is to rebuild as little as possible retaining as much of the original house as possible.
Once you have a handle on how to create the open plan you need to figure out how to arrange the pieces of this newly hatched space in relation to the components and flow of the existing house. The kitchen is usually the key to this arrangement. Its placement can achieve any number of things by being a beginning, an end, an alcove, or a spatial divider for examples. One of the most common arrangements is a linear one with descending viewpoints to a vista; one starts by standing in the kitchen, then sitting upright while dining, then lounging while living before taking in the view. In this arrangement each activity is able to get a clear view of the vista over the next activity.
As with the projects built from the ground up, the result in all cases is an open plan with an open kitchen running the show. And as with the new builds the remodeled open plans and open kitchens can work in almost any housing type or style whether it be a city home, a lake home, or a condominium. Bon Appetit!
For a discussion of kitchen functionality please check out Katie Leaf’s blog titled Kitchens of SALA Past.