Kitchen with a Fluted Bar

A kitchen designed and visualised for a client in Poland, opening onto the living room. The plan is a U: a run under the window with the sink, the hob on the side wall with drawers beneath it, and a peninsula that comes back into the room. A tall column on the opposite wall holds the fridge, a narrow pull-out, the oven and the coffee machine, so there are no wall cabinets and the window wall stays open.

The peninsula works from both sides. On the kitchen side it has three wide drawers under the worktop; behind them a raised bar top screens the worktop from the sofa. On the living-room side, push-to-open fluted doors cover shelves, and an LED strip at the plinth washes the floor. The end is a slab of the worktop stone that turns down to the floor. The coffee machine sits behind a door with a framed opening, so it shows through when the door is closed and slides out on a shelf when it is in use.

The design went through three rounds with the client. The June version had black stone, black handles and open bottle shelves by the glazed door. In August it became cream framed fronts with a brown stone top and copper handles. For the final round the client wanted a classic, neutral white: the fronts became flat matt RAL 9016, the worktop changed to Colonial Gold stone, and the splashback shrank to a 70 cm panel behind the hob. Along the way the hob was centred over the drawers below it, a pull-out cargo unit gave way to wider drawers, and the sink moved to the end of the window run next to the dishwasher.