J. Bryan Lowder hates the incessant demands for open kitchens on HGTV.
However, there is one distressingly popular design choice that has spread throughout HGTV’s stable of shows like black mold through a flooded basement, and I can no longer abet its growth by keeping silent. I’m talking about the baneful scourge that is the “open-concept kitchen.”
I’m with Lowder on this one. I’ve seen some god-awful open concept houses. Open concept can be done well, but it also be done really badly. I find it very distracting to talk to people in those homes, because I’m mentally rearranging their furniture, adding large area rugs to delineate the space, and adding architectural elements to break up those huge rooms of mess. I saw one last week that involved a huge tan, circular leather sofa right in the middle of the space. Shudder.
Apt. 11d 
I dislike open kitchens and floor plans. I get that they are good for entertaining but that is something that is usually done only a few times a year and the rest of the time you have to put up with seeing the dirty kitchen. Also, the acoustics are pretty poor, everyone is shouting so they can be heard across the mile-wide room, there is a lingering smell of cooked food all the damn time, the tv is always on and you can’t escape it. So, yeah, I prefer a house with lots of little rooms.
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Eh, I think open kitchens are perfectly fine. The author’s concerns strike me as massively overstated, except maybe if you constantly have dinner parties with surprise cooking techniques. Any home design can be done well or badly, and open kitchens have powerful benefits in terms of regular interaction when you’re not trying to hide your cooking-snob tricks.
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I agree that open kitchens for most are not the way to go. As others have said, too noisy for those those that are sitting in the adjacent area to watch TV or have a conversation. I love, however, a decent sized eat-in kitchen with a country table where people hang out and prepare food/eat/chat when they want, but doors can be closed and people go elsewhere when the cook does not want to be distracted. It is kind of the best of both worlds.
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We have an eat-in kitchen that is pretty separate from the living room. As a family, we always end up in the kitchen. It’s only when we’re doing fancy entertaining that we end up in the living room.
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We have an open plan kitchen and can’t imagine anything different for the way we live. When we entertain, it’s always with potluck and a lot of take out, so it works for that. When we don’t entertain, we like that whoever is in the kitchen is part of the social group on the floor. The dirty dishes are kind of annoying, but can’t be seen from everywhere. And we don’t have the tv on unless we’re all watching (that would be disturbing).
Also, in our house, the open plan means water views from all the main rooms, which would be cut off without the open plan.
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I think that with a lot of open kitchens, you have the choice of either 1) actually cooking and having a horrible mess on view or 2) just ordering pizza. (Super modern kitchens are some of the worst offenders–I’ve seen so many in magazines that are severely elegant, but the effect would be destroyed if you actually used them. More traditional kitchens are (at least in my opinion) more forgiving of a little creative chaos.) In fact, taking this to the logical conclusion, I’ve even heard that on the West Coast, you sometimes will see Asian homes with two kitchens. The first kitchen is a big, showy Western kitchen (presumably open to living areas), whereas the real cooking will be done in a small second working kitchen:
“According to the Bloomberg story, houses being snapped up by Chinese buyers in Vancouver have “two kitchens: a large Western-style one and a small ‘wok’ kitchen with a stove, sink, strong exhaust fan and door to seal off cooking aromas.”
http://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2011/06/the_chinese_are_coming_to_buy_your_apartment_wok_kitchens_a_plus
(I’ll note here that some relatives recently sold a house to Chinese buyers, and they didn’t have any such thing–but I’m sure it’s a plus.)
The kitchen in our new house is not visible from the living room, but fortunately the breakfast nook is large enough to accommodate our dining room table (which seats 6). I’m happy with it, and plan to eventually put a bigger table in the breakfast nook. There’s an adjoining formal dining room, which is currently serving as a gated playroom for the baby (and office space for me). I’m not sure what we’ll do with the formal dining room down the road, but options include 1) turning it back into a formal dining room 2) home gym or 3) home office for my husband.
There aren’t any doors in the public areas (kitchen, dining room, living room) of our new house, which is a relatively contemporary look. However, each room is well delineated, rather than being a chaotic jumble of furniture and functions in a single big space. I like the compromise.
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I disdain open floor plans. Smells, combined with the grease from cooking can easily seep into the living room. Gross! Sorry, I think people don’t clean and they don’t do “real” cooking. Ick, ick,ick. Also I don’t need to see kitchen items while I’m relaxing in my living room; for me that’s just not zen. I wonder if class, ethnicity, income, age or even region in which one resides (northeast v west v south, etc ) influence this?
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If your living room is three feet from your kitchen, I don’t think a wall is going to do much to stop the smell. If you’re getting grease that travels that far, the burner is probably just a bit high.
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I am really enjoying the blog Lowder mentions about the woman who advises against renovating your house to have an open kitchen because it will ease the burden of child-minding. She’s a divorced mom who had five children in 3.5 years.
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we have a kitchen that is open to the family room, which opens to the deck. There’s a door to the dining room. It’s one of the reasons we bought this house.. I like the open spaces for casual entertaining, but can still do formal in the dining room with the kitchen messes discreetly veiled.
The TV lives in the basement as it always has, so no problems there..
It is true that designing around the open spaces needs care and attention, the family room sofa keeps moving around.. once we no longer have three double basses in there on a regular basis, it should become a little simpler though.
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A good range hood fan can deal with smells.
I don’t invite people to dinner who have trouble observing the process of food preparation.
If we had servants, we’d want a closed-off kitchen. But we don’t, so…we don’t.
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Speaking of kitchen gripes, what is it with these magazine cover kitchens with ornate scrolling woodwork with hundreds of crevices? I can’t find one just this minute, but I see them all the time.
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The faux Tuscan style? Not a big fan either. Goes with what I call the “cartoon mansions” that combine all sorts of disparate architectural styles including the ubiquitous turret. Of course none of it makes visual sense nor is in proper proportions.
I like the open kitchen – it’s open shelving that I don’t like. Looks stylish but a HUGE dust catcher.
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I’d like a not-1980s kitchen. It doesn’t have to be open plan, but not with these awful 80s cupboards and laminate countertops that look like someone set up a mold farm on top of a patch of dirty moss. I’m glad that our kitchen isn’t open concept because it is an ugggg-leee room. (But we knew that when we bought the house and it’s one big reason why we were able to get this house so cheap compared to others in the neighbourhood.)
When I do scrape up the money to renovate the kitchen, it won’t go open-concept but that’s mostly because I’d like to renovate before we retire and I’d have to save until we retire in order to pay for that degree of financial folly! I enjoy watching the home-shopping shows on HGTV where the snooty first-time buyers have to not only have granite counter-tops and stainless steel appliances but only certain shades of granite and certain types of hardware on the cupboards. . . . So ridiculously privileged!
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We have an 80s kitchen that was built in the 90s by somebody who apparently really fixated on past.
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Gotta love the green and peach of the 80’s. And hey, brass is back in again!
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