How we got to where we are now!

In my last blog I said I was going to give a little background on the design of our Sammamish remodel for Ryan and Jennifer. When I first met them they were disgusted with their kitchen, in fact the whole downstairs.

The kitchen was directly behind the living room with a wall separating the two, not the open plan we all like to live in these days. Plus there was huge space off the the right of the dining area that was unused. In the picture below you can see the shape, the living room isn't on the plan but you can imagine it in front of kitchen.

They had been thinking about this for quite awhile and wanted someone to guide them through the design process. Ryan's dad is an architect, Ryan and Jennifer are both designers in their own right and they had talked to some other kitchen designers. They wanted to remove the wall bewtween the kitchen and the living room and maybe bump out the back two feet to create more room.

As a designer working with clients that have a limited budget I try to come up with ways to use the existing space in a more efficient manner before adding more square footage. Here a few different ideas we seriously talked about.

 

After looking at these and a few others we decided that the best use of the space was to have the dining room behind the living room and have that flow into the kitchen. This way you enter the home in it's most formal area and transition back to the least formal. It also allowed us to add a huge amount of glass. The house backs up to a greenbelt that features wildlife and a lovely pond. This way you could view it from the whole downstairs. Here is the design they settled on. The wall is gone and the kitchen is at the other end.

Next time, more about how the remodel is going. It is looking great, the new windows are all in, what a difference.