Cohousing-L Mailing List: Connection between kitchen and dining room

[Pablo Halpern (phalpern]

Hi all,

We are on the eve of making a critical decision on the design of our common
house kitchen and dining room.  I know this is short notice, but we would
like to know (by Thursday night, 5/14 if possible) opinions on the following:

How important is it to have visual and/or aural connection between the
kitchen and the dining room?  Specifically, we originally had an interior
double-hung window between the two rooms so that we could control the amount
of noise (especially from the dishwasher) but still allow cooks to see and
talk with people in the dining room. This is now looking too expensive and
we are considering either making the window fixed (non-openable) or else
opening up the kitchen entirely by eliminating the wall between the kitchen
and the dining room. With all of the discussion of noise on this list in the
past, we are very concerned about the latter option. However, we don't want
the cooks to be isolated, either.

What has your experience been? Is there too much kitchen noise in your
dining room? Are your cooks too isolated? Have you found a good balance?

Thanks in advance.
- Pablo

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Pablo Halpern                                    phalpern [at] newview.org