Some questions to understand your constraints better:

How important is it for you to keep the music room intact? From your description it looks like it's used actively but on the other hand, you talk about demoing the wall inbetween so it looks like sound proofing is not very important.

Are you open to sharing recital area and exercise area (so only one activity can be conducted at a time?)

Are you flexible about moving around the areas and kitchen specific plumbing?

These will hopefully provide more pointers to folks here.

The music room is used for teaching piano and guitar; there needs to be a dedicated area, with both pianos near each other. Soundproofing is not important. (for dog-phobic students, the dog is put in another room entirely). We might bring in screens to separate it visually, though.

With the music wall opened up, yes, the living room does double duty as exercise area and recital space. The idea is that students will perform from the music room and we'll move the furniture so friends/family can view from the living room.

I am confused. Is there a dining table/dining room?
I guess not.
In cases like this, where you desire eating together, I would try to keep a table and let the island go. The table will double duty as work table as well as eating, not ideal but better to accmodate regular company.. I think your family values the social aspects of eating together. It does not feel right to eat on the island with company.

You can fit more people on the table as the same sized island, IMHO...

I'm confused as well - you don;t want dual -height island or a kitchen table. How is your 5'- with a walker family member, supposed to climb up into and sit comfortably on a counter height stool at the island for meals?

No room for a dining room. It is very hard to fit 48" frig, 36" range, 30" sink and dishwasher with landing space around the edges and keep all the windows and still be able to block off the kitchen from the dog. I've tried and can't find a solution doing it that way, can someone else? Only when I put the range on the island do we get the windows back (I'm the one who is willing to give up some of the south windows, so it's frustrating to me to honor this requirement). Actually there is one layout that works, but then the entry path to the house crosses the work triangle, which I think is even worse than this layout.

blfenton, you are absolutely right about the counter height chair issue and I have another thread about that very problem. Summary: we are considering 34" high island with 22" chairs (low but that is the distance between our current eating area and chairs as well 18" chairs with 30" table) and are testing out chairs. Dual height is not out the question, but it would be nice if there were communal seating at that height, not just a nook for the older family member.

We currently have a double-duty table as eating and work space and don't like it. Although, that is partially because we waste a lot of square footage on long dark entry hall to bypass the kitchen, so there is almost no maneuverability room in the current kitchen, might be better in corner door plans. I've done 20+ designs, some have a dining table or dual height island. It's really too bad we can't get rid of the entrance and just do a side entry. I'll try to clean up and post some more layout ideas.

I'm working on mapping out more our house floor plan. I have yet another idea that more massively rearranges more rooms and removes walls (but might cost more than the house devaluation due to entry through kitchen, so ...)

Oh, and just to clarify: all plumbing is movable.

I know this sounds radical, but could you possibly make the kitchen/entryway the music room? it's already open to the living room and might eliminate the issue of devaluation due to entry into kitchen. Then... could you move the north (left on picture) music room wall flush with the other wall where the door is. Where does that go to? Used often? If only for students and you were to flip the two rooms; then that could be closed up. You could add windows to satisfy family members in search of more natural light. If this is a possiblity; then definitely more layouts could be worked on.

I was thinking on the lines of remodelfla as well, and once you open the possibility of moving the spaces around, there's a bunch of things that you could do.

But with the current placement as-is, I thought of the following plan. This is drawn using Google Sketchup, and it is very rough. It's to the scale though. However, this is meant to be a schematic and not a plan. The details such as width of the peninsula etc can be filled in by the knowledgeable gardenweb folks.

Here, as you enter, you find the peninsula and peninsula level seating to your right. On benefit side, this should serve to separate most of your kitchen from entry. You have ~6' wide kitchen inside but it can be adjusted by moving the peninsula to make the entry hallway narrower.

By keeping the peninsula height same as counter, you can accommodate the needs of your elderly person.

The drawback of this schematic is that you have reduced cabinet space (e.g. pantry is gone now) .. Your elderly will need to travel inside the kitchen to get her food out of the microwave :-). Not sure how well it works for you, but if this seems remotely interesting, then this can be hashed out further.

All dimensions such as bar stools etc. are approximate. Also, apologies for font size; clicking on the image will open the original size image. {{gwi:1706240}}From Kitchen Plan

Do be sure the fridge columns are OK for your short lady with a walker--I opted to not get one because the height made them less useful for me. I just couldn't REACH things. They also can take some serious muscle to open (this seems to vary though). You're looking at a wider column than I was so maybe you can fit enough stuff down low to make the fridge practical.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this -- that I totally understand your choices here. What you're trying to achieve is a luxury kitchen with high-end appliances in a relatively limited space with lots of constraints. Not having a formal dining room is something that does not bother me; if you hardly use it (you mention that your family lives in/around the kitchen) then you will not miss it.

Also, while creating the plan I uploaded in my previous post, I realized that there is not enough space to accommodate your 36-in range in this kitchen. If you can bump out the front wall, by all means you should since that would make your kitchen bigger.

Another alternative is to move the refrigerator outside of the main kitchen space to relocate it beyond the passageway to the bedrooms. This will free up more counter space for small appliances and cooktop range.

Hope this helps, and awaiting others' input!

Radical may be the way to go, if we widen the remodelling to more rooms it does open better possibilities. The left wall of the music room is hard to move, though -- it is a bathroom for one of the bedrooms. More layout coming later ...

Thanks homeybird for taking the time to sketch that out! -- helps to broaden ideas. We do need seating/eating space inside the kitchen for a dog phobic friends, though, but it could be tweaked some.

Good point about the frig/freezer columns. I haven't found a layout that would benefit from dividing up the 48" built-in, but just wanted to say we were open to considering it. We do try to keep food for the older family member on just one shelf since she has a restricted diet and this helps her to know what food is best and find it quickly (so it may not be a problem even with columns.

Ok. Here is more of the house layout as it exists now. You can see that the entry hallway is long, narrow, and enclosed (I call it the 'hall of doom'). The kitchen currently includes a full size free-standing dining table. It is extremely cramped (it used to be worse -- it only had the entry to the front all initially, it was closed to the living room -- a kitchen cave off the hallway of doom). This house was built by the older family member's husband when they married. It never really did have a dining room. Music room used to be a utility/mud room and front office a bedroom for kids. Although my housemate (the builder's son) has claimed "bachelors shouldn't build houses", I think he actually put a pretty big kitchen and utility room in as it is for the size of the house (he was clearly taking his bride's needs into account). It's just that his son became a gourmet cook. :-)

It would probably be best if we didn't redo everything. Maybe leave the bedrooms and back bathroom alone.

I'm thinking that maybe putting the office (heavily used, critical) where the current music room is, then moving the kitchen to where the living room is and removing all walls between the current kitchen and office and seeing if that space is contiguous enough to be used as recital area.

Here's a fuller view of the space (missing only the back utility room and a far back bedroom, and the closet measurements in the bedrooms are approximate/incomplete):

Honestly, I think you need an architect.

The plan posted at top looks like a resale killer to me. I do believe it's possible to meet your needs while preserving and enhancing the value of the house. Your music room, for instance, should probably be thought of as a dining room, and be staged that way someday for resale. After all, you want a sort of alcove that's very open to the living room--perfect for a dining room as well as for what you need. But a house with no dining room and (I think some folks missed this) no kitchen table either either requires lots of reno before reselling, or a lit match. Don't go there.

Are the windows on the south side counter height? or... if not, could they be? I really see possibilities even with leaving the doorway where it is IF the windows can be counter height and you can run a leg of the kitchen along the south wall. Also, if you were to consider that; the closet (first one, in your hall of doom... could you make that a pantry? I'm imagining a u shaped kitchen that ran from your doorway then along the south wall with a peninsula along the space shared by the current living room. Seating could be incorporated along that peninsula. Just another thought.

BTW... I had to google doro wat since I love to cook and try ethnic foods. A type of chicken stew red pepper sauce? How do you make the spiced butter. I couldn't find anything on that.

Remodelfla, believe it or not the hall closet is already our pantry. :-)

I do have one layout like you describe (keeping our 'hall of doom'). Sort of like this? I used to have a pantry box on the end of the frig, but you are right that we could keep using the hall closet like we do now. The 'peninsula' is a freestanding kitchen table so it can be removed. Though it does limit dog containment somewhat. We could get a table with a center panel to block dog passage.

marcolo, while that is a good point, we already don't have a dining room and the house never did. There was a kitchen table in the kitchen, that was it.

There is a whole area of 19th c. houses nearby where they moved the kitchen up front inside the front door so that the living area could be at the back and face whatever small yard or patio there was through french doors or sliders. There is a completely open variant and a bypass variant where there is still a semblance of a hall, and the ones that are not so open seem to work better and sell better. It is a big paradigm shift for people to walk right through a kitchen to the living areas. I think a hall plan works better.

I don't know why people are so against hallways and entry ways, many architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright intentionally used entryways and hallways to give a sense of compression before walking into a larger space. It made the bigger room both feel bigger and become more of a destination.

Your hall is 9 feet long, thats not so much.(The halls in the large houses that comprise my complex are in the range of 40 feet.) If it really seems dark make the kitchen backsplash some kind of translucent "window" panel.

Here is a 3D view into the U plan above (minor tweaks: I moved the table further into the living room and extended it for more seating. Also you can then belly-up to the window (which was moved out from under a load-bearing beam, oops). This was a minor preference: we grill out on the driveway area and it's a long hike into the back door and up to the front kitchen. A window pass through-option is a minor nice-to-have we'd like.

Not sure what I think of the studio-apartment feel that this accentuates. Looks are secondary to function, though. Although I call it 'the hallway of doom', I'm most against it for stealing working space from the kitchen. I have looked at interior design photos that brighten up the hallway, so I think there is much we could do (there is very little light there now and we can fix that).

I was thinking of removing the left wall so the hallway is more open. Then you have easier access to the hallway closet/pantry as I understand the whole house layout. If you could extend a tiny bit into the living room; you could do an 18' overhang at counter height for seating ... maybe that would bring it to the end of the window. That would give you more space for cabinets instead of using the entire peninsula for seating. You'd still get seating for 3 along the long end and for one at the end. You could put your couch on the opposite wall so it doesn't conflict with the counter seating. My friends elderly Mom loves to sit on a comfy chair with a snack tray table to eat her meals. Would that make your Mom feel too isolated? I imagine that the stools could be turned around for guests who wanted to sit and enjoy the recitals.

remodelfla, I'm not sure I understand. if we remove the left wall, where does the fridge go? or are you thinking just a pass through? And we need seating in a dog-protected area, not just around the outside of the kitchen. Those friends sit in the kitchen while we are preparing meals (right now they make it a real hassle to cook because space is so cramped). My head hurts.

How much do architects cost to draft ideas? We will have one for permits (since there are load bearing beams that need to be extended to remove at least one wall) and we have a GC for when we know what we want to do. Is it really an architect you hire at this stage for this scale of work? It's only after we've sketched out a few dozen ideas, imagined working in them that we discovered our requirements. I had a plan I thought was great until we realized we had no place for a friends to sit with us in the kitchen and eat that was safe from dog. Ooops. And I've just been informed of yet another requirement: we need space for 2 grand pianos, not an upright and a grand. We have one grand in storage (actually, we have 2 grands in storage but one is for sale).

Here is the tri-level peninsula plan I thought would work: seating for 4, a pleasing visual barrier between living room and kitchen, a pass-through window for grill food and a nice working layout. This one has the hallway to the living room and center house door and lots of storage. It has a regular table height eating area. Great, huh? We imagined living it and realized there was no way to socialize in the kitchen with dog-phobic friends. That how we discovered that requirement. I still love this plan.

I have three dogs so I'm a major fur baby lover... could you get a baby gate and put the pups in a bedroom with the gate up in the doorway so they wouldn't be closed up crying and scratching but your dog phobic friends would be comfortable? I'd hate to see you give up a plan you love and that would give you what you need for an occasional inconvenience.

I wish i had a program to draw what I meant for you. Imagine the wall not there then frig, DW, sink, cabs/corner, range around where you show it, cab then a peninsula with cabs at the bottom for some storage and then you could do the table height seating/overhang like on the iteration above in the living room area.

Can you put the dog behind a shut door elsewhere when those friends are around? A bedroom or basement?

How about one of these in a tall size for the dog? You can screw hooks into the wall if necessary (I have a large obnoxious puppy and would need hooks, but a mature dog might just get the hint).

Getting the dog problem out of the equation might help a little. Still going to be a challenge, though!

Here is a link that might be useful: portable folding pen thing

We are reconsidering the 'requirements'. Folks may be willing to give up the south window in the kitchen (keeping the front one and the large one in the living room). Then the fridge can go on the south wall which makes the center door entrance to a hallway doable again. I'll work some layouts on that. The 2 grand piano request turns out not to be a hard requirement either (phew!). I'll start a new thread with the new layout ideas. Comments here have been very helpful!

The dog already gets shut up for some students. Our dog-phobic friends (several of them) come over multiple times a week and stay for hours. Don't really want to confine the dog that much.

No offense, but maybe you need to deal differently with your "friends." You seem rather exacerbated by these people that come over to your home all the time, stay for hours, get in your way while you cook, and expect you to hide your pet. Now you are planning your kitchen around their needs as much as your own. You have to admit, that sounds a little strange.

I definitely think you need to keep the hallway. In the first plan you showed, I shuddered at the thought of walking directly into the kitchen. I also can't imagine having your elderly family member utilize anything but a table height counter to eat at. I'm not even 40, but at just under 5' tall, bar and counter height seating is uncomfortable for me. So, I do like the low counter for seating that you show in the last plan. I can't really tell much about the rest of the layout though. Maybe it can just be 2 heights at the peninsula, counter height and table height.

You don't need to pen the doggy--those pens open up into a 16 foot "fence" that you can position anywhere. It's a lot more flexible than having to setup a gate in an aisle.

These are the things we love: cooking, being with friends, being with our dog. Things we don't like: the current kitchen. The current kitchen has:

-limited counterspace -- we now have a kitchen cart that lives in the living room taking up space there. Regular use items are on top of fridge because of lack of counterspace.

-microwave on the bottom shelf of cart so older family member can't use it and it is back-breaking to use/clean for everyone else, too (no counter space for it, no room for a second cart).

-oven that is too close to the floor (the door actually lies on the floor when open) and opens directly into the main kitchen entrance.

-Kitchen table with 2.5 foot clearance to counter -- we sit in this space and it is also a walkway (including use by person with walker).

-People frequently have to exit kitchen to allow access to fridge doors or for other people to pass through.

-26+ cu.ft fridge is packed to gills (plus we have a fridge and two freezers in the garage (a full height and a chest).

-coffee grinder won't fit under current low cabinets so takes up a great deal of the prep space beside the sink.

-When we grind grain, roast green coffee beans, dehydrate kale, or do the sausage making, folks are banished from the kitchen table interrupting meals.

-We have a lot of fruit trees (orange, lemon, lime, pomegranite, apple ...). During each season, more implements compete for limited space. The pomegranite press juicer eats up more sink prep space, the apple mead sits out in the very limited stove area for months.

Exasperated with friends? No -- their presence makes dealing with the kitchen oddities more than tolerable. The cramped space has never stopped the parade of fun cooking stuff like buying whole pigs and parting out to friends or making our own bacon and sausage (though it has sometimes been quite the circus: juggling the meat grinder, sausage stuffer, keeping lots of ice handy to keep everything icycold, shuffling people as trays of sausage are sent out to the garage fridges/freezers after being stuffed, etc). We love visiting the farms where we buy our food, learning how to kill and prep live chickens and I even once camped out at a Tenn farm for a week learning various fermentation methods (including making soy sauce). It's a pretty major part of our lives.

Now, I was having trouble explaining to the master chef/homeowner front entry into kitchen was a bad idea. "It just isn't done" wasn't cutting it, and "it'll hurt resale" elicited a response of "well, can we get an estimate from a realtor as to how much it would devalue the house? Maybe it's worth it anyway". And there are financial and family connection reasons that the house will probably be his for the rest of his life. But I let him read your responses so he knows it's not just my opinion. :-)

Cooking is a really big deal for us and is way fun. It will go on, no matter the size and layout of the kitchen. That said, the side south window may be on the chopping block and center hallway options are back.

I am not good at visualizing plans like many on GW are...but I had to chime in and say you sound like a really cool and interesting person! You sound like y'all have a lot of fun and enjoy life. I hope you find the perfect plan.
Oh, and in our previous house, we did a small addition that we hired an architect to help with. I believe it cost less than $3000, and they TOTALLY helped us to think out of the box. It was worth every penny, plus they helped us to make sure we got a good GC. It might not be a bad idea to bounce your needs off an architect.

I think all that cooking and sharing with friends sounds great. Given the choice, my first pick would still be to flip the music room and kitchen. The constraints of the current kitchens size is going to impact the layout no matter what and considering the kind of cooking, prepping, and sharing you do; I truly believe you would benefit from the additional space. You guys sound like you have a ton of equipment and need all the space you can get to house it; never mind meeting the rest of the kitchen and lifestyle requirements.