Single Aspect Blog

In brief: Fit wooden sliding doors or build a chimney breast

I do love my readers.  The title of this piece is taken from a Google search from Norway and I was very taken by the phraseology.

The reader was looking at Alexandra Road which demonstrates a great way to combine kitchen and dining room while allowing separation from the living room. In the photo above the kitchen is behind the left hand partition wall.

The subject of how to separate the kitchen from the living room is one that exercises my mind a lot, especially with the emergence of multiple ensuites (which occupy limited floor space) and the dreadful kitchen /living  / dining room.  Examples of my thinking along these lines may be found in the following articles:-

Opinion:-

Separate kitchens

Fabrik Coldharbour Lane Brixton SE5

Kidbrooke Village – Phase One (easily the worst example)

Taylor Wimpey example of kitchen design

Where has the kitchen gone?

2 bed, 2 shower, 3 toilets, no bath, no kitchen – WHY?

Three double bedrooms, two bath, no kitchen

Academy Central Longbridge Road Barking

Practical solutions:-

Alexandra Road

In the example below, taken from the LCC scissor blocks, the kitchen was a separate room with a large wooden sliding door (similar to the Alexandra Road estate above) enabling separation of dining and living room.

The dashed line in the drawing above between K and LR shows the location of the wooden sliding door. The clear space by the windows (at drawing left) was sufficient for a five foot dining table placed parallel to the window.

Here’s an example from Thamesmead South showing a similar sliding door to that used on the Pepys and other estates across London.

In the 1960s our neighbours lived in a large detached house with the side entrance straight into the kitchen which was separated from the adjacent dining room by a breakfast bar with open shelving above it, and a door. There was a central chimney breast with open fireplace on the other side of which was the living room again separated from the kitchen by a door.  Imagine a large square space divided horizontally in two, the upper half divided again, the lower half of the square being the living room, the upper left quadrant being the kitchen and the upper right quadrant being the dining room.

Now that was 1960s open plan living but there was spatial separation between each of the functions including acoustic separation from the kitchen.  In modern flats no attempt is made to replicate that desirable design but rather the reverse is the case in that so little space is allocated to the dwelling that the removal of or absence of a wall between the kitchen and living room is intended to increase the appearance of space in the small dwelling.

Alexandra Road (note sliding door)

The existence of the modern kitchen / living room / dining room all-in-one prevents separate use of what used to be individual spaces, by people seeking to engage in different activities, some noisy, others like study requiring near silence.   Life for a family is likely to be intolerable with children seeking to do homework being confined to their bedroom (if they have the space for a desk) and no separation of television watching from the opportunity for conversation.  Who wants to hold a conversation when the television is on?  How can you watch television when others are talking in the same room?

The architect Peter Deakins, who designed Pepler House on the Wornington Green Estate in North Kensington (Trellick Tower is the most well known landmark), has kindly sent me a section of a drawing showing the dining room and living room separated by a wooden sliding door in much the same way as the arrangement in the LCC scissor flats described both on this page and elsewhere in the blog.

The quality of much modern house and flat design is risible and I have given only a few examples necessarily limited by my own experience of life and what I have found from searching on the web for floor plans.  How is it that a society can move backwards in terms of development?  I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.  It can only be desperation for housing of any kind, and ignorance on the part of the would be residents, that is driving people to buy or rent these dreadful places and I personally long to see the (best) housing standards of the past brought forward to the present.

Lawn Road flats – Isokon near Belsize Park tube