A kitchen extension in Putney succeeds or fails on the plan of the room, not just its footprint. Before we draw a wall we map how the household actually uses the space: where the cooking happens, how many people sit down to eat, whether the island is a working surface or a social one, and how the room links to the garden and to the rest of the ground floor. On a bay-fronted terrace near the Upper Richmond Road the realistic prize is a single well-organised kitchen-diner won from the back addition and a modest rear projection; on a West Putney semi with a deeper garden there is room to separate a cooking zone, a dining table and a soft seating corner within one room. The footprint follows that brief, not the other way round.
The island is usually the decision that shapes everything else. It sets the circulation around it, carries or excludes the sink and hob, and dictates how much clear space the room needs to feel generous rather than congested. We plan for roughly a metre of working clearance on each active side so two people can pass and appliance doors can open, and we decide early whether services run to the island — a sink or induction hob there means drainage, water and power crossing the floor slab, which is far cheaper to design in than to retrofit. Where the room is tight, a run of full-height units along one wall with a slimmer peninsula often gives a better-working kitchen than a squeezed island that looks the part but blocks the through-route to the garden.
The rooms around the kitchen are what stop the main space becoming a dumping ground. A utility taking the washing machine, dryer and a second sink keeps noise and laundry out of the open-plan room; a pantry absorbs the dry stores and small appliances that otherwise colonise the worktops; and a boot-room or rear lobby by the garden door catches coats, bags and muddy boots before they reach the finished floor. In a Putney terrace these are carved from the back addition, the understairs and the old kitchen; on a larger house they can be planned as a proper service spine between the kitchen and the garden. A boot-room by the garden door earns its place on a family house near the Heath, where a rear garden and children track mud straight into the room otherwise. We size them at the layout stage because retrofitting a utility once the slab is poured is exactly the compromise that makes a finished kitchen feel unresolved.
The garden threshold is where a kitchen-diner earns its keep, and it is a detail as much as a design gesture. A level or near-level threshold between the finished floor inside and the terrace outside makes the room read as one space with the garden, but it has to be built to keep water out — a drainage channel across the opening, the right upstand and falls, and doors detailed to weather a south-facing or exposed elevation. We set the choice between sliding doors, bi-folds and a fixed glazed screen against how the room is used: sliders give the cleanest view and the tidiest reveal, bi-folds open the whole wall for summer but eat sill space when stacked, and a large fixed pane with a single door often gives the best light for the least fuss. On riverside and Embankment houses the exposure and setting push that detailing harder still.
Daylight is the difference between a kitchen-diner that feels alive and one that is dark at its centre. A rear extension deepens the plan, so the middle of the room — often the dining zone — can end up furthest from any window. We bring light in from above with rooflights or a glazed lantern over the dining table, keep the garden wall as glazed as the structure and overheating allow, and think about a side rooflight where a return wall would otherwise cast the worktop into shadow. Orientation matters: a south or west-facing Putney garden floods the room in the afternoon and raises the question of solar gain and glare, so we balance the glazing against shading, ventilation and the risk of a room that overheats in July as readily as it darkens in December.
For the large share of Putney homes that are flats and mansion-block apartments, a kitchen project is usually reconfiguration rather than extension — and that changes the whole exercise. Opening a cellular kitchen into the living space, relocating the kitchen to a better-lit room, or slotting in a utility means routing drainage to fall correctly within a fixed floor build-up, managing extract and noise for the flats above and below, and upgrading sound and fire separation between rooms. All of it sits under the lease, so freeholder consent and often a licence to alter come first, and any wet area moved over a neighbour's ceiling has to be detailed to protect them. We treat the flat kitchen as a coordination problem — servicing, acoustics and consents — as much as a design one, because that is where these projects actually turn.
