Open-Plan Kitchen & Dining Room

One of our own completed rooms: a wide kitchen and dining space with painted in-frame cabinetry, a long island with seating, a range cooker set under a built-in mantel, large-format stone flooring and a recessed ceiling detail with a rooflight beyond.

Rooms this size are usually the result of removing structure, and that is where the management sits. The openings, the steelwork and the ceiling zone above have to be resolved together, because the depth of the beam decides whether the recessed ceiling detail and the lighting layout are possible at all.

Flooring on this scale also has to be set out deliberately — where the first slab lands decides every cut at the perimeter. It's a five-minute conversation on site that either happens before the tiler starts or gets lived with for twenty years.