When deciding on how to upgrade your kitchen, you should consider the pros and cons of a closed or open kitchen design. The design you choose depends on how you want to use your kitchen and which benefits you prefer. When deciding on an open vs. closed kitchen, learn the pros and cons of each from Dallas’ kitchen remodeling experts.
Should I Build an Open Kitchen?
Open kitchens have made their mark on contemporary home construction. Owners of older houses often want to transform their enclosed kitchens to open ones, removing walls, cabinets, and counters to open up their floor plans. Homeowners have varying opinions on the merits and disadvantages of removing the separation between the kitchen and living spaces.
Pros of an Open Kitchen
Some of the advantages of upgrading your kitchen to an open design include:
1. Better Ventilation
When you cook, you create various smells and smoke that can become trapped in an enclosed room. Open kitchens allow those odors to dissipate in a larger space. This kitchen design also keeps your kitchen from smelling stuffy or stale.
2. Easier to Multitask
Open kitchen design allows a view into another room, usually the living room or dining room. While cooking, you can keep an eye on your kids, watch television, or otherwise engage in other activities.
3. Better Access to Light
Kitchens without a wall between them and other rooms in the home allow much more natural light to help illuminate the cooking. Windows and light fixtures in kitchens sometimes don’t provide adequate brightness, while taking advantage of the lighting from a wider space makes cooking easier.
4. More Sociable Cooking
An enclosed kitchen area makes it difficult for more than one cook to easily move around in the room. Opening the space up allows for family or friends to join you in the kitchen, helping to cook, or simply socialize with you while you work.
5. Makes the Kitchen Feel Larger
While an open-concept kitchen doesn’t actually add square footage to your kitchen, the airiness of an open space helps your room feel larger.
Cons of an Open Kitchen
While open kitchens offer many advantages, some of the downsides include:
1. No Privacy
Working in a kitchen without walls allows anyone to watch you cook. Sometimes, you may wish to cook without eyes on you or friends and family trying to engage you in conversation. Without any walls, you’ll have to speak to them or seem rude.
2. Less Cabinet Space
With an open-concept kitchen, you lose the cabinets that would have attached to the wall between it and other rooms in your home. While you could opt to build a counter with cabinets below, you’ll create a half-wall between the rooms that may look unbalanced and throw off your open space design.
3. Has to Fit in With the Rest of the House
When choosing an open vs. closed kitchen, you’ll need to match the design of your kitchen to the areas it butts up against; otherwise, you’ll have warring styles in the same room. As these styles fight for attention, you may feel uncomfortable or unsettled as you contemplate them. To avoid this problem, you’ll need to carry your home’s style throughout the rooms involved in the open-concept design.
4. Kitchen Noises and Smells Invade the Home
An open-concept kitchen allows cooking smells and sounds to carry throughout all rooms in the open design space. Cooking sometimes requires a lot of noise and odors, and with an open kitchen, these elements will mix with the other rooms.
Should I Build a Closed Kitchen?
Closed kitchens often appear in older homes. Some appear as standalone rooms with four walls and a doorway, while others called galley kitchens have three walls and a pathway leading down between counters, cabinets, and kitchen equipment. All closed-off kitchens provide some benefits over open designs but also come with some disadvantages.
Pros of a Closed Kitchen
Closed kitchens offer some advantages, including:
1. More Cabinets
With walls on all sides, you can build plenty of cabinets to maximize storage space.
2. Maximum Privacy
Since the kitchen won’t open up into other rooms, you can easily retreat to your kitchen to work on cooking or cleaning in private. With no eyes tracking your every move, you’ll focus better and complete work faster.
3. Kitchen Doesn’t Interrupt the Rest of the Home
With an enclosed kitchen, your home won’t have to deal with the sounds and smells that emanate from pots, pans, microwaves, and more.
Cons of a Closed Kitchen
Some disadvantages of a closed kitchen include:
1. Less Light
A closed kitchen has limited light, relying on fixtures in the kitchen and any windows in the room.
2. Confined Space
Enclosed kitchens can feel cramped even with one person in them, let alone chatty friends or curious children.
3. Difficult Ventilation
Trying to disperse smoke and cooking odors can prove difficult in a kitchen without open walls, so you might need to install a ventilation system. Kitchen vents can cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, with the alternative presenting as a smoky, smelly kitchen.
4. Isolates Kitchen Users
When using your kitchen, you won’t have visibility into other parts of your home. Friends and family will stay separated from you unless they come into the kitchen, getting in your way while you’re trying to cook.
Add Value With an Open or Closed Kitchen Design by NG Platinum Homes
When considering open vs. closed kitchens, you must consider everything from how much privacy you prefer to the potential loss or addition of extra cabinet space. Other homeowners wonder, “How much value does an open plan kitchen add?” adding another aspect to their considerations. Some of your most difficult questions require answers from professional kitchen renovation specialists, such as our builders at NG Platinum Homes.
Our family-owned company can offer guidance on professional kitchen and bathroom remodeling, ranging from the most popular styles to up-and-coming technologies. If you need to remodel or renovate any part of your home, call us at NG Platinum Homes in Houston, TX, at (281) 271-3838 or in Dallas at (469) 667-3334.
