Cooking in the garden: 11 ideas - each one more beautiful than the next - for creating outdoor cooking areas
Anyone with a very large garden or balcony certainly spends more time outside as temperatures become milder. So when it is time to organize lunches and dinners with friends and family, there is usually a lot of hustle and bustle bringing food to and from the kitchen to the table. But what if there was a kitchenette, or even better a complete kitchen with everything ready to go outside of the house?
An outdoor kitchen is certainly an addition that makes a garden, balcony or terrace much more livable, and depending on the style desired and the space available, you can create a dream setting. Check out some of the ideas below:
An inexpensive project is to create a kitchenette close to the house: you can create a long worktop equipped with a stove (or better, a barbecue) and a sink, or a real oven. And if it is placed flanking the kitchen, passing ingredients and utensils through a window would make it very useful.
A kitchenette can also be built on a terrace, with a worktop as a countertop that also acts as a dining table, with special stools adding to the overall ambience.
These kitchens, of various types, can be a great idea to deck out a fence - even one that is wooden.
There is no shortage of ideas that use recycled wood such as that from pallets and more: a bar with outdoor kitchen in the rear. Just remember that outdoor kitchenettes are exposed to the elements, so will need regular maintenance and care (and the more you have in the kitchenette, the more maintenance will be needed). So, it is strongly suggested that the best equipped kitchens are those without too many, unnecessary fittings and utensils and that are positioned under weather-proof canopies, awnings and pergolas.
The set-up and layout can be of many different types, depending on the materials, style and colors chosen. Wood is a great focus of most of these projects. It will need to be properly treated to resist bad weather and humidity, even if it is positioned under sheltering canopies.
Brick and stone are also very popular, perhaps better when combined with wooden elements. And you don't necessarily need to design a giant kitchen: even a small but well-designed kitchen transforms the way of enjoying your garden.
Modern projects made from concrete are also very beautiful: they adapt to paved areas or even wooden platforms.
And if you like rustic solutions, you can find many ideas for creating compact and comfortable nooks, and which even use wooden boxes as wall shelves!
If you then move on to considering masonry solutions, then you create a truly robust space that can be set up with built-in appliances, just like a normal home kitchen.
But maybe you also like a more Spartan idea like the simple combination of wood and metal!
It is also useful to study a way in which to frame these spaces: the type of canopy or pergola that protects them contributes to the final aesthetic result!
Would you like to build an outdoors kitchen?
