The Open Corner

The room is one length. The kitchen is at one end, the table in the middle, the sitting end at the garden. Two banks of full-height units face each other across the middle of it, and everything that would usually be on a wall is in them -- the ovens, and the tall storage either side of them -- so the working kitchen reads as its own room without a wall to make it one.

Nothing hangs over the island. The extraction is set into the worktop beside the hob rather than into a hood above it, and the rest of the room depends on that one decision: from the sink you can see the whole length of the floor and out through the corner, and a hood would have been the only thing in the way of it.

Graphite handleless doors, and walnut used twice -- on the island and on one run of wall units -- so the timber reads as a decision rather than as trim. The splashback behind the sink is bronze mirror, which puts the garden back into the half of the room that faces away from it.

The floor is the same slab inside and out, and the glazing slides back into the corner. In summer the threshold is a line on the floor and nothing else.