Contents
A person feels more comfortable in spacious rooms than most of our apartments, and many private houses, do not sin. Rooms can still be more or less decent in size, but kitchens are often frankly small. Especially in the famous “Khrushchev”. This is where the idea of redevelopment comes in. The most popular option is to combine the kitchen and the living room or dining room. Due to the fact that the wall leaves, additional meters appear, and a properly designed interior of the kitchen combined with the living room can enhance the feeling. About how you can arrange the combined premises and will be discussed.
Combining the kitchen and living room: the pros and cons
The idea itself came from Europe and America. In these cultures, the kitchen and living room together is the norm. But the way of life there is very different from ours: few people cook complex dishes at home. Basically, if they do anything, then sandwiches can warm up semi-finished products. This is where the cooking ends. With us, the cooking process takes not half an hour or even an hour. All this is accompanied by strong and persistent aromas. If the kitchen is combined with the living room, then there will not even be such a leaky barrier as a door. A powerful hood and a well-designed ventilation system can partially cope with the spread of odors. But far from 100%. You will have to fight this (by strengthening the hood and properly organizing air exchange) or put up with it.
Another point is cleaning. In a kitchen open to all eyes, you will have to constantly maintain perfect order. You will no longer leave any unwashed dishes or products on the table, as everything is in plain sight. Another moment. If earlier it was necessary to clean only in a small kitchen, then in the kitchen-living room the area, and hence the time for cleaning, is much larger.
All about the shortcomings. Now about pluses. In a spacious room, the sensations are completely different, not like in a small kitchen-box. Here it is more pleasant to work and relax. Consolidation results in less effort and time required to set the table or clean it up: less moving from room to room. What is also important is that in a large room you can implement much more original design ideas: the interior of a kitchen combined with a living room is definitely much more interesting than two separate rooms. Here there is an opportunity to play with the levels of the ceiling and floor, with color and light, combine materials and combine styles. All this is also important and often outweighs the negative points. But before you make a final decision, you need to familiarize yourself with the legal requirements.
Legal subtleties
If a gas stove is installed in your kitchen in an apartment building, you are prohibited by law from combining two rooms: you cannot demolish the walls. There is one possibility: to make the doorway wider. In this case, the kitchen and living room will be adjacent. You can decorate the doorway in the form of an arch or make it square – it depends on the interior. At the same time, doors are required in the opening. They can be sliding or folding, but they should be.
If there is electrical equipment, the combination is possible, but the wall can only be demolished if it is not a carrier. The supporting walls cannot be dismantled: the whole building may collapse. But even here there is a way out: instead of walls, put columns equal in bearing capacity to the former wall. To do this, you must order a rework project in a specialized organization.
Just make sure in advance that such an alteration can be accepted by the administration and you will be issued a permit for such work. It must be obtained in any case. To do this, you will have to write an application and attach a redevelopment project.
After obtaining permission to hand, you can proceed to the demolition of the partition.
Zoning Options
Although we tried to combine the living room and kitchen, in the design they are trying to separate them. Still, one zone is working, the second is designed for a pleasant pastime and relaxation. Naturally, the styles should be different, as is the furniture used. This division is also called zoning: we divide the room into zones.
Ceiling and floor to separate the kitchen and living room
The most common technique is different levels of floor and ceiling. When combining two rooms, they can turn out naturally – they were just different from the beginning. It is not necessary to align them, but you can beat them by using finishing materials of different textures.
Even a small difference of a few centimeters is enough for the rooms to be visually separated. And if you add a different texture and / or color, the effect becomes more noticeable. From a practical point of view, it is more convenient when the place where food is prepared is slightly lower. So the garbage, which at the same time certainly appears, is less spread. It is a pity that this is not always possible to implement.
You can read more about decorating ceilings here.
Partitions
A more obvious way to separate one part of the studio kitchen from the other is to make a partition. Such is the strangeness, at first they removed the wall, now we are recreating it. Yes, but in a different version – lighter and more airy, which only marks the border without compressing the space.
The most material of the partitions is glass. Only part of the passage can be closed, or maybe the whole one. In this case, sliding systems are most often used. Such a glass wall visually leaves the living room-kitchen as a single room, but prevents the spread of odors and almost completely dampens sounds (in the closed position, of course).
Another way is to separate the kitchen and living area with a plasterboard or wooden (furniture) partition. Naturally, the partitions are not whole, but only “partial”. In some interiors, the kitchen is separated from the living room only by a hint of a wall, in others it is located in the middle of the zone, leaving two passages to the right and left. A hall combined with a kitchen with an arch or just a beautifully designed opening often looks much more attractive than just dividing it with light. After looking at the photo, you will understand what we are talking about.
The next way is to organize a bar counter or counter. They differ slightly in design, but not in the method of device. Sometimes, even at the stage of repair, a “stump” about a meter high is left from the former wall, which is then converted into an appropriate separator. Sometimes such a rack is placed on purpose, often made from kitchen cabinets. From the side of the kitchen, these are cabinets, and from the side of the living room or dining room, there is a bar counter. Practical. Especially for small kitchen studios.
There are many options for zoning the kitchen and living room. In the photographs you saw only a small part of the design methods. Taking one of them as a basis, adding something of your own, you will get your own, original and unique design project for your combined kitchen-living-dining room. After all, this is how the resulting premises are often used.
How to separate the kitchen from the living room with a partition, we think it’s understandable, but that’s not all. The layout of the living room-kitchen also provides for the choice of lighting. This is no less important than anything that has been discussed before.
Several options for repairing 9 meter kitchens are here.
Lighting in the living room-kitchen
Since rooms with different purposes are combined, the lighting in them also requires different things. In the kitchen, work surfaces are required to be clearly visible and the light needs to be sharper. In the living-dining room, the atmosphere should be softer. Ideally, they make multi-stage systems, then, if desired, the light is made bright or dimmed. Based on these requirements, a lighting scheme for the combined premises is being developed.
In the kitchen, the problem of illumination of work surfaces can be partially solved by installing lamps or LED strip on the lower end of hanging cabinets. They will give illumination and lift the cabinets visually.
If the kitchen area has an “island” or a stand-alone bar counter, you will have to make lamps above them as well. These can be ceiling options or descending from the ceiling on long cords. In some design options for a kitchen combined with a living room, you can put classic chandeliers.
The interior of the kitchen combined with the living room of a small size
We have to talk about small rooms separately. In small areas, most of the ideas cannot be implemented: functionality in such premises comes first. Nevertheless, even on 15 squares you can make a very good interior, let alone 20 sq m or more …
You have already seen some of the ideas in the photo in the previous chapters: this is a counter, which is also a dining table and a zoning detail, or the same counter, but which, on the one hand, has kitchen cabinets.
The main idea is to make the interior of the kitchen combined with the living room in bright colors, with a few bright accents. Light shades add volume, expanding the boundaries. Another well-known technique is the use of mirrors.
A few ideas for a small kitchen can be found in this article.
The next moment is the installation of furniture to its full height: a large amount of it simply does not fit, but everything needs to be accommodated. Therefore, we make lockers and other storage systems under the ceiling. In addition to functionality, they also merge with the wall, raising the ceiling.
Read more about kitchen interior design here. The subtleties of choosing a kitchen set are described here.