Is the Broken Plan Kitchen a Modern Classic?

Is the Broken Plan Kitchen a Modern Classic?

You’ve heard of the open plan kitchen before. It’s a versatile, though controversial, classic of interior design, as happily integrated into a classic countryside retreat as it is into a sleek, modern, minimalist apartment. It transforms the downstairs space, without ever threatening the old adage that the kitchen is the heart of the home.

In fact, the open plan kitchen makes it all the more practical for the kitchen to be the heart of the home. Rather than choosing between taking up a space in the dining room or living room, away from whoever has volunteered to man the dinner preparations, everybody can keep together. There’s more scope to explore a veritable smorgasbord of kitchen design ideas, because the space is (in all likelihood) bigger and more open to layout changes.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why open plan kitchens aren’t all that practical. They introduce a lot of noise, steam, smoke, and smells into parts of the home that would generally be best kept away from those elements – not to mention, there’s no chance of being able to close the door on those just-finished-cooking messes, even for a little while.

Still, the open plan kitchen lets in life and light, and it invites conversation. It’s a firm staple in interior design and, even if it will never be an ubiquitous design choice, there’s no denying its popularity.

But what about the lesser-known contender – the cleverly-named broken plan kitchen? If the name has passed you by until now, don’t feel too bad – it’s just now gaining traction.

What is a broken plan kitchen?

A broken plan kitchen is not all that different to an open plan kitchen, but there is one key difference. While the room remains large and versatile, it is ‘zoned’ into a collection of smaller, self-contained sections.

If that merely sounds like a traditional ‘downstairs layout’, then stay with us. Broken plan kitchens still feel spacious, and like everything remains in the same space without lots of doors and walls and hallways in between. But that open plan layout is essentially ‘broken up’ by tactical furniture arrangements, screens, curtains, glass walls, changes in lighting, and other ‘zoning’ tools.

The trend is largely attributed to the ‘open plan burnout’ people were suffering after several years of work from home, school from home, do-everything-and-anything from home. With the open plan kitchen making it more difficult for people to segment their lives, and feel a sense of transition from one part of the day (and one part of the house) to another, interior design trends started erring in favour of a more disconnected layout.

Will it take off?

The tricky thing about the broken plan kitchen is the fact that it’s far more open to interpretation than its more traditional counterparts. It is, in many ways, just an open plan kitchen with a carefully segmented layout. In order to create a broken plan kitchen, you need to start with the ‘blank canvas’ of an open plan kitchen, after all.

So, while some would look at a broken plan kitchen and see a revolution for interior design, others would simply call it a well-designed open plan kitchen – one that circumvents some of the biggest bugbears they present without closing it off entirely – and nothing more.

Zoning a bigger room is a great way to get more out of that space and avoid the feeling of the house’s occupants being dwarfed by wide stretches of wall and floor. We’ve written before about zoning a room using wallpaper, but it doesn’t need to stop there. Foldable screens and half-walls can really help an open plan room feel less, well, open, without pushing you to the polar opposite.

Broken plan kitchens can look incredibly effective, but perhaps they are a ‘conclusion’ reached more organically than others – by first creating an open plan kitchen, then working to make it feel like less of a wide, open space. Otherwise, the idea seems to lack the clear vision we tend to have of an open or closed plan kitchen. Recent years have seen interior designers favouring new twists on old classics, however, and the broken plan kitchen strikes an unlikely (and perhaps even contradictory) union between two opposing forces: open and closed.