Kitchen and oak doors, Worthing

A kitchen in Worthing, West Sussex. Tennant designed it and fitted it, in sage green shaker doors with a white worktop and chrome handles. A new doorway was formed into the room as part of the same job, and new oak doors were hung through the rest of the house.

The opening is the part you cannot see

Everything in the photographs is cabinetry except the thing that changed the room, which is the opening in the wall.

A kitchen fitted into an existing room is limited by the doors and the walls it finds. Forming a new opening changes that before a single unit is set: it decides where you come into the room, and therefore which wall can hold a full run and which one gets broken up by a doorway you have to walk through. That decision is made in plasterboard and timber, not in cabinets, and it is made first.

What the photographs do show is that it was finished rather than just cut. The reveal is squared and returned into the room, the architrave lines through with the skirting either side of it, and the floor runs straight through the opening without a threshold strip stopping at the line of the old wall.

Glazed doors, and what they are for

The oak doors hung through the rest of the house are glazed in three tall lights rather than solid.

That is not only a look. A hall with one small window and doors off it is a dark hall, and the usual fix is a borrowed light over a door or a glazed panel beside it. Glazing the door itself does the same job and takes no extra wall to do it: light from the rooms either side crosses into the hall through the door, and it keeps crossing when the door is shut.

The trade-off is that a glazed door shows its own hanging. A solid door out of square can be eased and nobody will notice; a glazed one puts three straight lines of glass right next to the frame, and any gap that is wider at the top than the bottom is obvious from across the room.