Kitchen-hallway: layout features and design options

In the minds of the majority of our compatriots, accustomed to the typical Soviet layout, the hallway and the kitchen are adjacent rooms, but still separate. However, in a private house, studio apartment or a redevelopment project drawn up by you personally, everything can be radically different.

If you are just thinking whether you need a kitchen combined with a hallway, or have already encountered such a layout and decide whether you need to take out the kitchen separately, you should soberly assess the advantages and disadvantages of these two zones combined together. As a rule, consideration begins with the pros, because we will appreciate the good combination of the kitchen space with the corridor.

• More living space in the apartment... If you already had a separate kitchen, you can now convert it into a small bedroom or study. For a large family and a relatively cramped apartment, such a solution may unexpectedly turn out to be an excellent option.

• The kitchen will become more spacious. Nobody said that combining is necessarily the transfer of the kitchen to the corridor. Since they are already located side by side, you can simply connect them, and then you will finally get rid of the cramped space that is typical for the kitchens of most apartment buildings.

• Convenience with groceries and trash. Arriving with a heavy bag from the store, you can start unloading it literally from the doorway, which is often very convenient.With garbage, everything happens in the reverse order, but also in the simplest way - it can, in principle, be placed at the front door and taken away already at the exit.

• Your home will become original. In recent years, originality has become a criterion followed by about half of apartment owners. This is your chance - while others are fiddling with styling, come on with your trump cards.

True, objectively there are a lot of disadvantages, and you must think carefully before going on such a risky redevelopment. However, judge for yourself.

• The corridor is getting very cramped. In most layout options, it was not calculated to solve so many additional functions, therefore the dining table is unlikely to fit here - you can only place a bar counter. To gather a large family or receive guests, you will have to organize a dining area in another room.
• The combined room will be especially dirty. This is not surprising, because both dirt and dust from the street and typical food contamination will get here. All of this is not conducive to appetite, so you will have to redouble efforts to restore order here.
• The smells spread throughout the apartment. Even the pleasant aroma of food is not always appropriate, and if something has already burned out, all household members will complain about you.
• A corridor with a kitchen can counteract... Just imagine - one of the family members is cooking, and someone is about to leave. Two people will clearly interfere with each other. Needless to say, now you can't sit with guests in the kitchen, because it will turn into a walk-through courtyard.
• The entrance hall in the apartment rarely has its own windows.that's why natural lighting is traditionally a problem here. Being in the corridor infrequently, we do not see this as a problem, but if you find yourself here all the time for culinary purposes, it can get on your nerves.
• Demolishing walls when combining two rooms or taking out communications when moving a kitchen into a corridor is a difficult task in terms of not only the work itself, but also obtaining the necessary permits. In an apartment building, you can't even try to do something without collecting a million certificates confirming that the multi-storey structure will withstand your experiments.

If the layout in a private house still leaves the owners with a certain space for imagination, then in a high-rise building you simply have to focus on the rules common to everyone that do not allow the building to collapse. If you nevertheless decide to connect two rooms, it is worth at least finding out what needs to be done and what difficulties may arise in the process.

• Project needed agree with the architect and numerous housing inspections - It is strictly forbidden to start work without receiving full approval. Even if you did everything quietly and nothing collapsed as a result, the very first check in court will force you not only to return everything back, but also to pay a huge fine.
• In theory, combining a kitchen and a hallway in a high-rise building is not prohibited, but there are certain conditions. So, the neighbors below should not have either a living room or a gasified kitchen under your multifunctional area, and the neighbors above should not have a bathroom or toilet there. If any of the conditions are not met, the project will not be approved.
• Instances will require that the corridor leading to the kitchen have a window - in extreme cases, such an opening should be at least in the next room. Controllers care not so much about natural light as about the possibility of ventilation.
• A gasified kitchen cannot be moved to another room or combined with anything. According to the rules, it should be surrounded on all sides by its own walls with doors, without which even walls cannot be saved - the same arches are not allowed. If you want to experiment - switch to electric stoves.
• Load-bearing walls and structures you will not be allowed to demolish never and never.
• Fire safety requires that in a furnished kitchen-hallway all the aisles have a width of at least a meter, and even better - 1.2 meters.

Given the potentially huge amount of dirt that will collect in a relatively small room, you should consider choosing the most practical finishing materials.

For walls, one of the best solutions looks like simple paint - if necessary, you can restore the freshness of the shades in the shortest possible time, and the painted wall is easy to clean. As the material for the apron, you will have to choose the most moisture-resistant and wear-resistant materials, such as tile, tempered glass, or even a metal panel. The named materials of the apron can serve for decades without replacement, which means they will not cause you any inconvenience.

As a floor finish, only two options are usually advised - either the same ceramic tiles or porcelain stoneware. Only these materials are durable enough to be relied upon in the long term.

Most often, zoning of combined rooms involves the use of different finishing materials for each zone - for example, in a typical studio apartment, the living room can be papered with wallpaper and lined with carpet, but more practical materials are required for the kitchen area. You cannot do this with a kitchen-corridor, since both rooms initially required particularly wear-resistant coatings.

The only option for a project with a visually noticeable transition is to use different shades of the same materials.... Sometimes, in order to emphasize that the zones are still different, you can also add a threshold, but still this is only appropriate in a long corridor, where both zones fit without problems.

More often it happens that the combined room forces both zones to make room... In this case, the use of such a hallway can be situational, and there is no clear line between the separate zones - if necessary, to accommodate guests, outerwear can be taken to the bedrooms, and the kitchen will expand to cover the entire space, and in everyday life, a little more space can be allocated for the same household shoes ...

By the way, combining the kitchen and hallway does not mean that they must necessarily become a single whole... In practice, some owners of small apartments simply do not want to feel trapped in a very limited space, therefore they prefer not to transfer anything anywhere in terms of technology and functional areas, but simply remove the wall between the kitchen and the corridor.

If instead of the former partition install a bar counter, we get a lot of advantages: a small area appears for a light snack, where you can sit with friends, more natural light from the kitchen gets into the corridor, and the feeling of being squeezed in cramped rooms disappears.

If you nevertheless shoved the kitchen deep into the apartment, this means two things: that there will be a lack of natural light, and that the room will inevitably seem more cramped, since it serves as two rooms at once. The easiest way to solve both problems at once is to focus on the lightest shades in the choice of interior decoration.

Many designers advise to paint both walls and furniture white - not only does it visually expand the space, but also the furniture will merge with the walls, as if "drowning" in them.

Artificial lighting should also be considered carefully. And the entrance hall itself, and even more so two rooms in one may be too large for one common chandelier to uniformly illuminate the entire territory. Experts usually advise scattering around the entire perimeter small luminaires to get rid of dark corners by evenly illuminating the entire space.

The kitchen combined with the corridor is usually it is not customary to overload with small details, therefore, patterns on the decoration or an abundance of any other small decorations are not welcome. By doing this, you will only emphasize the tightness, which will most likely put pressure on you in the hallway, where you have also shoved a stove with a sink and a refrigerator, therefore it is better to give preference to monochromatic solutions or discreet patterns.

The photo shows a vivid example of how useful a spacious corridor can be used. If there is enough space, you can not combine anything, but simply take the entire kitchen into the hallway. There is enough space here, but nevertheless, the designers did not deviate from the basic rules - here the colors of the finish are comparatively light, and there is a mirror behind the doorway, visually increasing the area of ​​the room.

In a small apartment it is unlikely that it will be possible to do this, therefore, in most cases, two adjacent rooms are precisely combined. The result, of course, looks much more modest than that in the first case, but the simplest budget repair option is shown here, proving that you don't have to be a wealthy person to afford redevelopment. As you can see, in the presence of a full-fledged window, it is already possible to spend much less on artificial lighting.

Here, the bar counter allows you to zone the connected space. This makes it possible not to take off your shoes in the kitchen and not cook in the corridor, while the apartment is spacious, and even four of us can eat or drink with guests, without really occupying any of the rooms.

For an overview of the kitchen hallway, see the next video.