Please come in!

It's a phrase we say easily when welcoming friends and family into our home. However, I always seem to add: "Please don't pay attention to the mess" as I quickly usher visitors through our teeny, tiny, cluttered - and might I add, soulless - hallway into our spacious, bright, happy kitchen.

Where we live - a quiet Dutch suburb nestled somewhere between Amsterdam and The Hague - the homes are narrow, with entryways a careless afterthought. Dutch architects have little to work with in our neck of the woods, where square footage is hard to come by as everyone congregates to the west of the country to be near the big cities. So you will often find lovely homes with minuscule foyers, perhaps just enough room for a coat rack and a mirror. Most people choose to ignore the space and focus on the rest of the house.

I am, however, thoroughly fed up with our foyer. Because both the kitchen and the dining area open out into this area, both doors feature glass panelling like in the picture above and even our front door has a large window in it (oh Mr Architect, what were your thinking?!}, it's not something you can close the door on and ignore. So this is going to be my next project. Now for some inspiration...

Kelly Wearstler

Would stripes optically enlarge the space?

 

Mary McDonald