AS Project Kitchen
- Project ÁBATON
- Photographs by Belén Imaz
In the house of the courtyards, the kitchen is the low space. While the adjoining living room rises to 3.6 metres and opens like a porch, the kitchen gathers itself beneath a 2.5-metre ceiling of exposed concrete, with the texture of the formwork on view. The difference is no whim: it is our way of giving intimacy to the most used room in the house without closing a single door on it. The circulation to the living room stays open; so does the feeling of being somewhere else.
That concrete slab covering the kitchen continues southwards and emerges into the garden as the barbecue porch. Inside and outside share a roof, and that changes everything. In summer the kitchen doubles up: hob inside, grill outside, an everyday dining area at the back of the kitchen and another in the open air beneath the slab, with coloured lamps and views of the pool and the vegetable garden.
The everyday dining area opens onto the garden through a window which, like others in the house, disappears completely into the wall. When it is open, the table is in the garden. When it is closed, the table still looks onto the garden.
We chose the furniture so that it would not compete with the architecture: grey-blue cabinets, a dark stone island with a white front, stools for breakfast and, beside the dining table, yellow chairs beneath copper lamps that provide the only warm accent in a palette of concrete, wood and grey.
This is the kitchen of a family with children who trusted us for the second time. From here one sees the central courtyard, hears the living room and steps out into the garden in two paces. The place where a house spends most of its hours, resolved with the lowest ceiling.
See other ABATON kitchen projects.
