Creating a good open plan home is the pinnacle of interior design. More complex than just knocking down interior walls and putting all your furniture into one large room, open plan living is creating a way of living that encourages communication, openness and a positive flow of energy through your home.
Before creating an open plan home, consider what’s important to you. Is it casual dining, helping your children with homework while the dinner is cooking, entertaining guests informally? It helps to create ‘zones’ for each area in the room, for example kitchen, dining, and living zones.
Create a subtle barrier between the zones, this can be using the shape of the room, colour or furniture layout to dictate where your zones start and finish. This won’t affect the interior design quality, but it will improve the layout of your open plan space and give you the perfect living space you’ve been dreaming of. Here are 10 ideas on creating an Open kitchen and dining room.
1. Open up your space
Give any room a more open feel by limiting furniture to the outer walls of the room, and put your dining table in an off-centre position, giving you more space along the length of the room.
2. Define your dining areas
This beautiful classic kitchen includes a breakfast bar for on-the-go informal dining, and a larger dining table for family dining. Keep these areas at separate heights and colours to define between them and to maintain their purpose.
3. Definition by lighting
You can define those ‘zones’ using clever lighting. See how this open plan room separates the kitchen and dining areas with cool spotlights in one area, and a large, feature light fittings in the other?
4. Shaping islands and peninsulas
Kitchen worktops are an essential tool for open plan kitchen living. By cleverly spacing a kitchen island and peninsula in this kitchen, they’ve set a boundary for kitchen space, but not closed off the entire room.
5. Eclectic wall
Architecture of your home permitting, create a quirky open plan living space by being creative with your walls and thinking outside the box when considering knocking down your internal walls.
6. Colour coded home
This dining room is kept separate from the kitchen using the colour green. Large green accents in the lighting and the cushions creates a separate colour palette for that area of the home.
7. Using the shape of your home
If you have a larger room that is unusual, or has a peninsula area, use this to define a dining area. This light dining area is cordoned off by three walls to give it a ‘zone’ of its own.
8. Large archways
Combine two rooms into an open plan space by removing internal doors and widening the archways. Stick with complementary colour patterns and designs, but consider each as its own.
9. Indoor and outdoor open plan style
Include your garden or outdoor space in your open plan living by adding wide French doors or sliding doors that you can access easily from your living area.
10. Space says a lot
Sometimes with open plan living all you need is space. This minimal kitchen doesn’t so much to separate the kitchen and dining areas, but position them relatively far apart so we can’t conveniently group them as one.
Open plan living is more of a lifestyle choice than a design choice, but there’s no bigger impact on the quality of your open plan lifestyle than the way you choose to design it.