Living/Dining/Kitchen: How do you live or how will you live?

... To keep the option open, I had to forgo an island kitchen....

But why is that? You can also place the island centrally in the kitchen area instead of on the latent boundary to the dining area. If it is then closed off, you can still walk around it.

We have "kitchen separate, with small seating area; living and dining room combined into one room" Visually, a large room looks more impressive, but we find it rather impractical for everyday life. Especially now with a child. What bothers us most about open kitchens is mainly the noise that cooking/cleaning up causes. And since my wife likes to do everything herself, from jam to baby food, she uses the kitchen quite a lot. And now that friends and we have children, party nights and cooking together are basically history. At most, in summer there is still some grilling together, or if we meet in winter, we usually order something. Hosting behavior and especially the frequency often change when you have children, one should not forget that. And even with a separate kitchen, you don’t have to do without an island, etc. We also have a long row of cabinets and a kitchen island. The kitchen was just planned a bit larger.

The floor plan did not allow it, I could only have placed the island in the middle of the "breakthrough".

We also couldn't decide. One wanted a closed kitchen because of mess, etc., the other an open kitchen for communication, etc. Our compromise: a 1.50 m breakthrough between the kitchen and dining room and a glass sliding door with frosted glass and print, which lets light through when closed but does not allow a clear view. When it is open, it is a decorative element in the dining room because it runs along the wall. This satisfies both of us, and even (critical) guests like the solution. Our architect designed the whole thing. Sylvia

As I said, ours is open, but we never have a messy kitchen anyway. I am generally rather picky, so we pay attention to it anyway, I can't sit on the sofa in the evening if the kitchen is nasty. But it was the same with the closed kitchen when we still lived in an apartment. And now we find it very comfortable just because we have a child and a lot of visitors.

Elina's concept is not unfamiliar to me: I once had acquaintances whose main focus was more on PC games (2 PCs next to each other in the living room for gaming, the TV was running in the background, and eating was done simultaneously). That was not really my thing

Maybe that was us after all, although: as typical computer-kiddy basement kids, we actually have no acquaintances unless they are called DarkRoxxor or Shadowkillah