The Long Table

A four-bedroom apartment replanned around one central kitchen that the family actually eats in.

Project: 01
Year: 2024
Location: Koregaon Park, Pune
Area: 2,450 SQ FT
Type: Residential
Duration: 22 WEEKS

The brief

A family of five had lived in the flat for nine years with a galley kitchen at the back, a formal dining room nobody used, and a living room that had become a corridor. They cooked every evening and ate standing up. They asked for more storage. What they described was a circulation problem.

The approach

We removed the wall between the kitchen and the unused dining room and set a single 3.6-metre island across the join. That one move made the kitchen the largest room in the apartment instead of the smallest, and it absorbed the dead corridor along the north edge. Nothing else structural changed; the services core stayed exactly where it was, which is what kept the project inside its budget.

The flat faces north-east, so it gets a strong flat light in the morning and almost nothing after two. We kept the wall finishes pale — lime plaster, brushed rather than polished, so it holds the texture without going grey in the afternoon. The joinery is teak, oiled and not lacquered, because a lacquered front in a kitchen this heavily used shows every mark within a year and cannot be repaired in place.

The island top is a single slab of Kota stone, honed. It was the most expensive line in the project and the one we argued hardest for. It takes heat, it takes knives, it takes a decade of a family of five, and it will look better in five years than it did on handover.