Open-Plan Kitchens in Mallorca Villas and Apartments
Key takeaways
- The wall is a question for an architect and, in a block, the community, before it is a kitchen question.
- An open kitchen is seen from the sofa, and its finish has to hold its own.
- Extraction and noise are what a closed kitchen was quietly doing for you.
- Open to the terrace often matters more than open to the sitting room.
Many older kitchens here were built closed, and their owners now want them open: into the living room, onto the terrace, or both. It is the project that changes a house most and the one with the most decisions hidden inside it.
The wall
Whether the wall can go is a structural question, and an architect answers it. In a villa on a concrete frame the answer is often yes with a beam; in a stone finca it is a real engineering question; in a Palma apartment the community of owners has a view on anything that touches the structure, the water or a shared duct. Settle it first, because the kitchen you then design depends entirely on the answer.
What opening it changes about the kitchen
- It is seen from the sofa: fronts, worktop and lighting have to hold their own against the living room
- The island or the peninsula usually stands where the wall was, and it is the piece that makes the two rooms one
- Extraction has to work harder, quietly, because the cooking smells now reach the whole floor
- Noise: a dishwasher and an extractor in an open room are heard where they were not
- Storage: the wall that carried cabinets is gone, and tall units on the remaining wall replace it
- Light: a kitchen that borrowed none now shares the living room’s, which is usually the point
Open to the terrace
On Mallorca the door to outside often matters more than the wall to the sitting room. A kitchen that opens fully onto a terrace – a wide door, a worktop that continues, the same floor through the threshold – is open-plan in the way this island lives, and it can be done in a house where the internal wall stays.
When a closed kitchen was the better room
A house that entertains formally, a cook who likes to close the door on the mess, a family with different hours, and a finca whose stone kitchen is beautiful precisely because it is a room: all reasons to keep the wall and open the kitchen to outside instead. The decision is about the house, and the design page is where it is made.
Can the wall between the kitchen and the living room come down?
Often, once an architect has said what it carries and, in an apartment, the community has agreed. It is the first question, and the kitchen is designed after the answer.
What do people forget about an open kitchen?
Extraction and noise. A closed kitchen kept both to itself; an open one needs a better hood and quieter appliances.
Is open to the terrace the same thing?
It is the island version of open-plan, and often the more valuable one. A kitchen can open fully to outside while the internal wall stays.
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