How to properly design a kitchen open to the living room and achieve a successful decor
The open-plan kitchen and living room is highly popular among households. This contemporary layout offers numerous advantages for daily life and for entertaining guests. To achieve a successful outcome, this type of design requires prior consideration of essential layout and decoration aspects. We guide you through this in this article.
The Open-Plan Kitchen and Living Room: A Modern and Judicious Choice
The open-plan kitchen and living room sends a strong message about your home. Your guests immediately perceive its conviviality, and you reveal your generosity, previously confined to a utility room.
Socially modern, this unpartitioned kitchen no longer isolates guests and allows all hosts to fully participate in a warm moment. It also enables sharing family life while performing household tasks.
If one focuses more on the aesthetic aspect, the open-plan kitchen adds volume to the living area. Circulation is more pleasant, and you benefit from the tranquility brought by natural light.
This option, as pleasant as it is clever, is largely justified, but requires careful consideration of the layout and decoration.
Designing Two Living Spaces in One
Even without a partition, the kitchen and living room remain two distinct spaces. This can be achieved in various ways, depending on whether you desire extreme fluidity or a clear contrast.
By opting for two different floor coverings, you will succeed in creating separation without emphasizing it. Prefer a warm covering like parquet flooring for the living room side and an easily washable one like tiles, cement tiles, or polished concrete for the kitchen area.
Wall paint also remains a clever way to differentiate the two spaces. To prevent any design mistakes, we advise you to rely on color gradients. It must be kept in mind that it is still a single room.
Finally, some will feel more comfortable with a figurative boundary between the two spaces. Glass partitions and decorative screens are solutions that add character to the room while retaining the advantages of the open-plan kitchen: natural light flow, easy communication, and circulation.
Maintaining Functional Spaces
The living room and kitchen remain living spaces with their own essential functions. If one meets the needs for relaxation and entertaining, the other must be designed for easy cooking and for everyday meals as well as special occasions.
When designing a kitchen layout, habit takes precedence above all else. It is essential to be able to perform preparation and storage tasks with simplicity. Only afterwards does one consider the opening to the living room.
Thus, it is essential to provide sufficient storage so that nothing is in disarray. As the living room is a reception area, it must always appear impeccable. Furthermore, avoiding unpleasant odors with a powerful and quiet extractor hood is appropriate in this shared space.
To perfect the harmony, we suggest integrating appliances into the furniture, as is done in a living room.
More and more households are opting for the central island. It indeed constitutes a transition point that adapts to everyone’s habits. As a bar, dining table, worktop with hob, or even an integrated sink, it plays a functional or social role suitable for both spaces.
Seeking Harmony in Decoration
The open-plan kitchen and living room requires finding a clever balance between differentiation and harmony. It is necessary to respect a few decoration rules to achieve this.
First, we recommend finding continuity in style. The two spaces cannot clash, and a country-style kitchen is not suitable for an urban living room design. Materials are your best allies for achieving coherence. Choose similar wood tones, and incorporate accents of metal or stone.
While color contrast might be tempting, we strongly advise against it. Here too, stick to the same tones. If your living room is very colorful, it is preferable to return to sobriety in the kitchen to avoid creating a garish and unpleasant room over time. Furthermore, white remains the cleverest color for kitchen furniture. Timeless and elegant, it allows for endless redecoration.
Highlighting elements will be achieved with light. Place your light fixtures above tables and gathering areas, and scatter LEDs above preparation areas.
