Why We're Drawing Kitchens Closed Again

For a long stretch, an open kitchen was the assumed answer on almost every brief we drew. Lately, that isn’t what we’re seeing clients ask for, and it isn’t what we’re drawing by default either. We’re putting more sliding or pivoting partitions between kitchen and living space than we were, and more clients are asking for at least a partial separation without our having raised it first. That’s worth explaining, because it isn’t a reversal of taste for its own sake — it’s a response to what open kitchens actually do in a home that cooks the way most Delhi NCR households cook.

The open-plan promise didn’t account for the cooking

The open-kitchen brief travelled from Western kitchens built around baking, simmering, and largely odourless, low-smoke cooking. Indian cooking, at home, routinely involves tempering with mustard seed and asafoetida in hot oil, deep- or shallow-frying, and spice combinations that release strongly into the air the moment they hit heat. None of that is a flaw in the cuisine — it’s simply a different thermal and aromatic profile than the one the open-plan layout was designed around.

In a fully open kitchen, that profile doesn’t stay in the kitchen. It moves into the sofa upholstery, the curtains, and the air the living room breathes for the rest of the evening. Extraction over the hob is fighting the geometry in an open room: it captures what rises straight into the hood and much less of what has already spread sideways at head height.

What we’re seeing in our own projects

Across recent residential briefs, we’re drawing more kitchens with a sliding or pivoting glass partition that can close during active cooking and open again once the smell has cleared, rather than a fully open plan with no barrier at all.

Two things about that glass are specification items rather than details. It has to be toughened safety glass: a partition beside a hob is a pane people walk into, slide hard against its stops, and set hot pans down next to, and toughened glass both takes thermal shock far better than annealed and fails into blunt fragments rather than shards. And the closed line of it has to sit clear of the burners, far enough back that it isn’t taking direct flame heat when shut — the hob manufacturer states a minimum clearance to adjacent surfaces, and that figure governs the drawing rather than the other way round.

We’re also seeing more clients ask, unprompted, for at least a partial wall or a peninsula-height divider between kitchen and dining, where a year or two ago the same brief would have specified a fully continuous counter with no break. This isn’t every project — plenty of households still cook lightly enough, or ventilate well enough, that a genuinely open plan suits them fine, and we still draw that layout where it fits the family’s actual cooking habits. But the share of briefs asking for some form of closure, even partial, has clearly grown against what we were drawing before.

Ventilation is the real lever, not just the wall

A closing kitchen only solves the smell and noise problem if the extraction behind it is sized for the cooking the household really does — a chimney hood rated for the load of daily Indian cooking, and ducted to the outside rather than recirculated. Recirculation passes air through a carbon filter and returns it to the room; it moves what the cooking released rather than removing it, and the filter has a service life the manufacturer sets and most households never look up.

We’re specifying ducted extraction more consistently now than we were, including in flats where running duct to an external wall means a longer, more deliberate ceiling plan to conceal it. Worth settling before that ceiling plan is drawn: a new penetration through an external wall changes the building’s envelope and its elevation, and most NCR societies require their own permission before anyone drills one. Establish whether the route is allowed, then draw the ceiling around it.

A sliding partition without adequate extraction behind it just delays the smell rather than removing it — the room fills more slowly, then holds it longer once the partition reopens. The partition and the extraction have to be designed together, not one added on top of the other after the fact.

The one opening that has to stay open

There is something a sealable kitchen must not seal, and it is easy to miss precisely because everything else in this piece is an argument for closing the room up. Where the kitchen runs on LPG cylinders, a small room, shut, with a burner running in it is exactly the condition under which a leak accumulates instead of dissipating.

LPG is heavier than air. It collects at floor level rather than rising, which means the chimney hood over the hob is drawing from well above it and does nothing about it — and the hood is switched off whenever nobody is cooking, which is when a cylinder or a regulator is most likely to be leaking unnoticed. A mechanical hood is not a substitute for permanent ventilation; it addresses a different problem.

What this calls for is a fixed opening to outside air that nobody can close: a louvre or a permanent vent low in the kitchen’s external wall, not a window someone is trusted to leave ajar. Have your contractor confirm the provision against the current building code and against the gas supplier’s own requirement for the installation. It is a safety item, and it is the one line on a closing-kitchen drawing that isn’t a matter of preference.

Noise is the second reason, less discussed than smell

A closed or partly closed kitchen also contains the noise of actual cooking — a mixer-grinder, a pressure cooker’s whistle, a hard chop on a board — in a way an open plan simply doesn’t. We’re hearing this more directly from clients with a home office or a study adjacent to the kitchen, where a video call and a lunch being prepared at the same time used to compete for the same acoustic space.

A sliding partition that closes during meal prep and reopens afterwards addresses this at a fraction of the cost of a full structural wall, and it’s part of why we’re specifying it more often on projects with a work-from-home room nearby.

Keeping openness without keeping the smell

The households asking for this closure almost never want to go back to a fully sealed, separate kitchen with no visual connection to the rest of the home — the appeal of an open plan, the sense of not being cut off while cooking, is something we’re still designing for.

What’s changed is that we’re treating “open” and “closed” less as a binary choice made once and more as a state the room can move between. A toughened glass partition keeps the visual connection intact even when it’s shut, which a solid wall never would. A pass-through hatch at counter height keeps conversation and serving possible without requiring the whole partition to stay open. These are the details we’re specifying more of, because they let a kitchen be fully open most of the time and briefly, deliberately closed exactly when the cooking calls for it.

Where this is heading in what we draw next

We don’t read this as a rejection of open-plan living — it’s a correction to an open-plan default that didn’t account for how the kitchen is actually used in an Indian household. What we expect to keep drawing, based on what we’re seeing across current briefs, is kitchens designed with a closing mechanism built in from the start rather than retrofitted once a client’s living room curtains have already absorbed a year of cooking smell.

If you’re planning a kitchen and want the openness-versus-closure decision made against how your household actually cooks, our residential interior design team draws that conversation into the layout from the first sketch.