Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How are your great room and kitchen connected?

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

At 02:01 PM 3/11/2008, Kristen wrote:
> Does your kitchen completely open to the great room/dining room? What works
> or doesn't work about this?

Our kitchen isn't completely open to the great room.  It's 
significantly open with two large open passthru counters and one 
small passthru space (and two doors).  The counters are very handy 
for meals serving and clean-up, and you don't feel isolated when 
you're working in the kitchen.

> Are you able to completely close off the kitchen from the great room/dining
> room? What works and doesn't work about this?

No, we can't close off the kitchen completely, and noise from the 
kitchen can be a problem at times.  We've always planned to have some 
kind of anti-noise panels that can be placed in the passthru openings 
to completely close them off when needed, but have not settled on a 
design that would be easy to operate, durable, affordable, wouldn't 
take up too much counter space, etc.  I hope one day we'll figure it out!

(Some solutions that don't look like they would involve rocket 
science evidently ARE rocket science, or are they brain 
surgery?  Anyway, harder to do than you would think.)

   Muriel
   Shadowlake Village Cohousing
   Blacksburg, VA