I just got back from an extended weekend trip to Arizona to visit one of my best friends for her birthday. Her and her husband recently purchased a brand new home in a beautiful gated development in Phoenix. Needless to say, we discussed custom house designs/building a lot on our trip.

After showing her our current design (Version 6), she immediately thought of a different house floor plan that is available to buy in her own neighborhood because of the kitchen. If you’ve been following this blog at all you’ll know that the kitchen nook area has been a big question mark for us. My friend mentioned that this floor plan is actually featured as one of the model homes. We were out her door and to the model as soon as possible! I absolutely wanted to check it out.

Here’s the floor plan, and as you can see, that the kitchen has double islands and the informal dining area in the kitchen is almost the same size as what we’re proposing for our house. With nearly the same layout.

Floor plan of the main floor of the model home

The model home actually has a wrap around couch in the informal dining area to create a nook feel. In addition, the interior decorator realized that the space is pretty large as well, and they actually put two tables in the space. To me, it feels a bit awkward to have two tables in one nook. As we were sitting in it, discussing the space it gave off a restaurant vibe.

We agreed though that a rectangular table will definitely work in the space, even if it didn’t have a banquette. So, this gives me some options and flexibility with the room. Maybe we’ll end up starting with a table and chairs and build a banquette later if we’d like. One thing that was interesting is that this home added 2 feet of walls on each side of the seating area to create an “alcove-like” feel to the informal dining space. That’s a great idea and it did define the space well.

Model home kitchen with double islands and informal eating area

Model home’s informal eating area with 2 tables and a wrap-around couch

This kitchen / great room layout is extremely similar to ours with the great room being adjacent to the kitchen. The biggest difference is that our current plan has another run of cabinets between the islands and the great room and although we’ll have a large opening into the kitchen, there will be a fairly significant wall dividing the two rooms. Below is a picture of the model home and of what our house would look like of we removed the wall between the great room and the kitchen. It’s pretty open, and our house has slightly larger rooms than the ones shown below. But is it too open? It is great for entertaining, that’s for sure.

Model home’s great room view into the kitchen.

Now I’m beginning to think that our own design might be too separated. It was nice to have the space open to each other, however I’m certain that Joel and I would think that it feels too open. I’ve got to discuss it with Joel, but I’m beginning to think that maybe we want to still keep the large cased doorway opening between the two rooms, but add a pass through window onto the dividing wall. This would be something similar to the examples below.

Pass through into great room adjancent to another door opening.

Pass through idea in kitchen.

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