small kitchen design ideas south africa
welcome to our house, it's a house that myhusband and i build about 9 years ago. it's a modern interpretation of a traditionaldanish allotment hut. it's a tradition you have in denmark whereyou have a small garden inside the city, where you have a little house in the garden. originally it was a place for people livingin apartments, being able to come out get some sun and air, and grow some vegetables. the house is 22 m2, so that's really not alot. we were allowed to build about 50 m2, butwe didn't want to do that because we wanted it to be a small house and just be a partof the garden and not the main feature of
the garden. let's check it out! this is the part of the kitchen that's outside,here we have this gas burner, and we have all the pots and pans conveniently at hand. underneath we have space for different...yeahthere's a lot of mess there. but it's nice to have a place to put things.wealso have a propane tank and the possibility to get some electricity in the garden if you'recutting the hedge or things like that. we spend a lot of time cooking, that's oneof our main hobbies, you could say. as you can see also, the way the kitchen extendsto the insides as well.
for a house of this size there's quite a lotof kitchen. and of course we like cooking from thingswe have grown in the garden, the first years before we had our children, our garden wasreally looking awesome with lots of vegetables and fruits and berries and things but afterwe had the children it's like... time has become a little bit short. so now it's not really looking that good anymore. but, still we can grow potatoes and corn andwe have raspberries and strawberries and salad and peas and lots of nice things. but mostly the things that are for just pickingand eating right away because the children
just love that. in this part of the house the ceiling is madeof these sticks you could say. and above that there's a translucent plasticroof so you don't get the rain in here, but still you get some light through. in the summer it's really nice because youcan sit in a kind of semi-shade when you're sitting here on the terrace. above these we have added some electricallights as well, i don't know if you can see them anywhere, there's one right there. at night we can turn that light on here andyou get this nice warm light.
this part in here is where you are actuallyinside the house, you can of course close off and keep warm and things like that. this is the room where we have the kitchenand the dining space as well. and it's only 9 m2. but when you open this fold-in door as wejust did, it actually extends to being like double the size. there's room enough for the 4 people of usto be eating here if the weather is bad and we want to keep warm. then we have this part of the kitchen thatis the part that's inside the house.
there's a lot of storage for things we needwhen we live here. but we chose open storage because it seemedmore light, if we had to put traditional kitchen cupboards up here i think it would seem tooheavy. and then also because we added this detailswith one of them being a window. this is the morning sun window, where thesun actually comes in and you can sit with the sun in your neck when you're eating yourbreakfast. and that's really nice. so i think that's neat detail. that it's the same boxes, different sizes,and one of them is a window.
we have these three drawers, it's just a standardkitchen from ikea. in here we have all the plates. we inherited from my husbands grandmother. for her, this used to be the really fancyplates that only came out of the cupboard when she had important visitors. but now it's just everyday use. she would probably roll over in her graveif she knew. in here we have things for doing the dishesand recycling and yeah, things like that. down here we have everything plastic.
and then we have just a small fridge. and finally we have this very small cupboard,where there's just room for the drying rack and some chopping boards and other narrowthings. in the dining area we can extend this table. so we can fit more people than the usual four. when the table is like this, we can fit sixor eight people here and then if we're more people than that we can add this one as well. looks a little bit odd but it works. this is the entrance area, this is the onlydoor that locks from the outside, so when
you enter you open that one and then you canopen up the rest of the house from the inside. there's space for coats and hats of course,and also some room for shoes on the wall to get things away from the floor. these hangers for clothes are a little do-it-yourselfproject we made this summer with the kids, they carved them from some sticks that wefound in the garden. behind this door we have the most privatepart of the house, this is where we have the bedroom and behind that door the bathroom. it's nice to be able to close off if the kidshave gone off to bed earlier than we do, then we can close if off so they don't get wakenup.
when we started building the house we didn'thave any children yet, in a way of course we knew that we would probably have some atsome point, but we didn't really design the house for a whole family but more for justthe two of us. so then, when we had the children and theydidn't sleep in a crip anymore, he had to find a way to fit all four of us in this roomof just 9 m2. so we did that by making this bunkbed whichis of course also build by ourself. it's build around two standard dressers fromikea. you might be able to see, it's a little bitmore narrow in this end than it is in the other, you can see we had to obviously fitit behind the door.
to make sure we didn't make it better forone of the kids than the other, this bed is lower than the other one so the space up hereis higher. so here you have a narrow space with a highceiling and up here you have a more wide space with a low ceiling. so there's good things about this place, andthere's good things about this place. the kids really love it there, it's like theyhave their own room. and there's also some storage for some oftheir things. as you can see it's designed like a tree,so it's actually two tree houses in one tree, so there's a ladder on the trunk and thenwe made these birds houses and birds.
we had to make sure they don't fall out ofthe beds, but inside of just adding a stick there, we wanted to make it more a part ofthe design. and then, you can see over here, behind herethere's some shelves for some of our stuff. it's nice having the kids as close as we havethem here, but i think it might be because we're only here in the summer. so if it was year-around it would probablybe a little bit crammed. here we have these eight drawers, so eachof the four of us had one drawer for clothes and then the last four are for the kids toys. here we have a more or less hidden closet,it lasted i don't know two years before my
dad noticed that there was actually a closethere. - good job! - there is room for some cleaning stuff andthings, and there's also the technical installations. in here we have the bathroom. it's quite small as well. but there's a toilet and wash bassin and abath in here, or a shower. so there is really everything we need. - is it a full size shower? like regular size?
i think it's 80x80cm. there's a nice detail i think that as youmove into the house, in the same way as it gets more and more private, the windows alsoget smaller and smaller. so out here in the dining area you have thesereally big windows, yeah of course you can see everything out, but people outside canalso see everything in. and then as you move into the bedroom, it'sjust a regular window, and the window in the bathroom is just a tiny one. but it lets in light and that's enough. the whole house is entirely self build bythe two of us, myself and my husband.
so for us it has in a way been a really nicehands on experience for how to build a house and not just draw it as we usually do. all the challenges that came up during thebuild like details and design things here and there were solved on site as we buildit. we made a lot of small sketches and piecesof wood and things like that. and it caused quite a bit of laugh from someof our neighbors, they said that it most be the allotment hut in aarhus that has beenmade the most drawings for. so.. i really like designing small spaces becauseyou have to consider every square meter, how
you use it. there's really no left over space here atall so. that's a nice challenge to get. having a place like this is kind of a retreat,we move out here when it's summer and weekend and nice weather, and you can really feelhow all four of us are just relaxing much more when we are in this place because there'snot so many things and there's not so many boring duties that we have to take care ofso, even if you want to clean the place it's done in 10 minutes. so i think that's really nice.
thank you so much for checking out the videowith us this week, i really hope you enjoyed checking out karen and peter's house, i lovedit! i loved the modern feel of it, and i lovehow small it is and i am particularly fascinated by the fact that they could have build itdouble the size but they chose not to keep the garden which is awesome. could you ever live that small? i don't know if i could. give it a thumps up if you liked the video,head on over to karen's website, i'll leave the links down in the description, hit thesubscribe button and we'll see you guys in a week. bye!