Preparing food with a light and friendly touch

Knocking through various internal and external walls has enabled the Cox family to have a bright kitchen/dining/ living area, writes Robert O'Byrne.

Whereas professional chefs used to be kept well out of sight, it's a feature of fashionable modern restaurants that diners are given abundant opportunity to see their food being prepared.

The same is also true on the home front. Formerly guests invited over to dinner were kept secluded in the drawingroom where a host provided drinks while, hidden away in the kitchen, their hostess - and the gender divide was always thus - would frantically prepare the meal.

The latter would eventually be served without anyone else witnessing the effort involved.

This scenario was only cast aside once men discovered cooking; what had formerly been a distinctly mundane, albeit very necessary, task was transformed into a spectator sport.

Today hosts, and even hostesses when they're allowed near the oven, want their efforts in the kitchen to be admired and appreciated and applauded; everyone's a Gordon Ramsay manqué, albeit with rather less swearing and knife throwing. Hence the rise of the open-plan kitchen into which guests are ushered while the drawingroom languishes in darkness.

Hence too the demand for a decent domestic space in which friends and family alike can be fed and entertained; somewhere that allows hosts and guests to interact while dinner is being prepared and served. Somewhere, in fact, like Julie Cox's spacious kitchen which, aside from being the spot where food is cooked, has enough space to serve as a livingroom, a dining area and, for those rare occasions when she and her husband John have time on their hands, a quiet retreat overlooking the garden.

The couple bought their home, an end-of-terrace property in Killiney, nine years ago. It's not an old house although at the time of purchase it contained what on paper sounded like a lot of rooms. Except none of these was very large or very bright.

"There was a small, pokey diningroom," Julie recalls, "with a door into a narrow galley kitchen. No, it wasn't wide enough to hold a breakfast bar, but there was a table pushed up against one wall."

Windows and doors alike were in the wrong location, somehow missing opportunities to interact with the exterior and only exacerbating the kitchen's deficiencies.

By 2001, Julie and John had, quite understandably, had enough and turned to Dublin architect Boris de Swart for help. The first, and most obvious, solution to their problem was to knock kitchen through into diningroom; the resulting space made still larger thanks to a single-storey extension on the side furthest from the original kitchen (that's the advantage of occupying an end-of-terrace house).

"I remember my dad saying we should have done something bigger and better," Julie comments, "but we didn't have the money."

Another few years and several children later, she and John accepted the wisdom of her father's judgement and once again embarked on six months' construction work which left them with a greatly expanded and more comfortable home.

"The idea was to have at least two more bedrooms, an extra bathroom and a playroom, with loads of light coming in everywhere."

All that came about, but even with all those extra rooms to use it's plain that the one place Julie and John like to spend most of their time in, whether en famille or entertaining their friends, is the kitchen.

Between de Swart and themselves, what they've created is a big U-shaped unit that achieves their ambition of being "practical but great looking too".

In its original incarnation, the rear of the house scarcely acknowledged, let alone interacted with, the garden beyond. All that's changed; lots of full-length windows and glass doors now make it practically impossible to ignore what lies beyond. The furthest remove of the U - a light-drenched snug - features floor-to-ceiling glazed panels that can slide back to dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior, and a slated floor with heating beneath.

"Yes," Julie confirms, "we wanted to make full use of the garden but another important thing was that neither of us wanted to be in the kitchen while everyone else was stuck away in another room."

Thanks to their redevelopment, that's never going to be the case; the entire wall that once separated diningroom from kitchen has been taken away and the floorspace originally assigned to dining table and chairs now holds a range of flexible leather seating that can be arranged according to the couple's requirements.

Beyond but sharing the same white walls and oak flooring lies a new, informal dining space just as well suited to lunch with children as dinner with grown-up pals.

"We do a lot of entertaining," admits Julie, whether "it's family oriented or having friends over." But what might once easily have felt like a bit of a chore is today an unquestionable pleasure, courtesy of a kitchen that's light and airy and easy to use. The purpose-made units are all painted a fetching shade of aqua blue and fitted with brushed steel handles. There's more than enough storage; and even enough room for a full-length wine rack - perfect for John who's a highly trained oenophile. Thanks to their efforts, what used to be a small, dark and not very enticing galley kitchen is now a culinary arena that would put a stop even to Gordon Ramsay's swearing.