When it comes to spending quality time with family and friends, it’s hard to beat the outdoors. Whether it’s hiking, camping, golfing or just sitting around a fire, the outdoor experience is the perfect backdrop for creating amazing memories with those you love. This is especially true when you get to share a meal together.
Perhaps this is why adding an outdoor kitchen to a home is one of today’s hottest building trends. How hot is it? According to the National Kitchen & Bath Association (NKBA), approximately 60% of homeowners are planning to add an outdoor kitchen to their home.
Why They’re Popular
A luxury outdoor kitchen is a thoughtful, well-designed space centered around friends, family, food and the comfortable enjoyment of nature.
To a certain extent, COVID-19 drove the growing interest in this space. The whole family trapped at home, looking for things to do and searching for more space to do them in. For some, a less than fully utilized backyard presented itself as an opportunity for improvement.
During the pandemic, the mantra was, “If you are going to spend time in person with someone outside your bubble, do it outside — there’s less risk.” The result of all of this was that more homeowners began to consider better uses for their outdoor spaces.
That said, the conditions that led to outdoor kitchens becoming one of today’s top trending home improvement projects started well before the pandemic.
“The origins of this movement really began with the West’s greater focus on designing homes that better integrate indoor and outdoor living spaces,” explains Russ Faulk, chief experience officer and head of product at Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet, a luxury outdoor kitchen manufacturer. “Although the integration of indoor and outdoor living spaces is a newer concept for Westerners, it has been an important design element in Japan for centuries.”
A key element of residential Japanese architecture is balance. Thinking about it from that perspective, an ideal home should seamlessly harmonize nature and the built environment. With this overall design philosophy in mind, an outdoor kitchen becomes one of the components of a well-designed home.
In the United States, the ideation of a luxury outdoor kitchen started in southern California and has radiated outward across the country’s different climate zones. With the technology available today, there’s no reason homeowners in Colorado can’t have a retractable window wall system connecting their indoor kitchen to the outdoor kitchen with an overhang, windbreak, heat, lighting and all the tools necessary to make their outdoor kitchen usable for most of the year.
Why Build a Luxury Outdoor Kitchen
An outdoor kitchen allows you to cook in a way you can’t cook indoors. For example, you can’t cook indoors with charcoal or wood fire. These materials give meat and fish a texture and flavor that are difficult to match with any but the finest gas grills.
To smoke ribs, you need smoke, and you’re not going to do that indoors. As for vegetables, they just taste better when cooked outdoors. Asparagus cooked indoors pales in comparison to asparagus cooked outdoors. To bring out the best in meats, very high heat is needed for a brief period. Even if your residential stove top can cook at 750ºF, no one is going to do that indoors. In an outdoor environment, smoke and extreme heat are not a problem.
An outdoor kitchen makes it easier to bring tastier, healthier, chef-inspired, restaurant-quality food to your home. Granted, not everyone wants to be a chef. If your core cooking in life is baking in the oven or boiling water for pasta, you will not be taking advantage of the opportunity an outdoor kitchen provides to help you level up your skills.
But you will still gain the benefit of being outdoors on a beautiful day. You will also elevate the experience of preparing even very simple meals for your family. Many feel that preparing a meal outdoors actually takes some of the drudgery out of performing this everyday task. In other words, an outdoor kitchen can be used just as easily on a Tuesday as you can use an indoor kitchen — but the outdoor kitchen will make the experience a lot more enjoyable.
Above Gallery: The outdoor kitchen of Steve and Kari Meehan
The Planning Process
When it comes to adding a space outside your home for cooking and entertaining, your needs and desires should primarily guide your selection.
“There is a big difference in what is necessary for a person who views cooking primarily as a means of sustenance, and someone who cooks as a form of artistic expression,” Faulk explains.
The design of the kitchen will be determined to a large extent by whether the home is new construction or is being remodeled to accommodate the new outdoor kitchen. To help the designer create a space that best accommodates your preferences, take the time to think through questions such as:
- How will the space be used?
- Will it primarily serve one family or entertain a group of people?
- What size groups will it need to accommodate?
- How many people will be cooking in the space at the same time, and who are they — the husband, the wife, a professional chef?
The design of any outdoor living spaces (outdoor kitchen, pool, recreational areas, the outdoor den with media, etc.) should be developed as a holistic part of the entire site plan. Just as an indoor kitchen is often the heart of the home, with proper planning, the outdoor kitchen can be more than the heart of outdoor living — it can be the heart of the home.
In planning, the goal should be to make things in the outdoor kitchen as comfortable as possible (for example, providing proper shading at the right time of day), so that weather is less of a factor in the decision to cook indoors or outdoors.
One of the biggest mistakes is bringing the design professional into the project too late. The best place to position the grill might already have the perfect overhang (to protect the space from the elements), but if the overhang is built from combustible materials, the grill can’t be positioned under it for safety reasons.
A great plan works for the homeowner, the region, the materials and nature, as well as for the rest of the outdoor living components like the landscape design elements — preserving and protecting nature in working with the architecture of the home.
Think of this space as a home, just one without doors and windows. During the design process, reflect on the rooms commonly found inside a home (dining area, den, living room, sitting areas). How are these inside rooms used? How can this outside space be utilized in a similar way? And what is the outdoor kitchen connected to?
The Transition from Indoors to Outdoors
Let’s assume you live in a two-story home and you want to add an outdoor kitchen in the back of the house, from the first-floor indoor kitchen to the outdoor kitchen. What will the transition between the spaces be like? Does the transition enhance or diminish the experience of moving between spaces? What can you do to improve this portal?
Sliding glass doors can inhibit the transition between these spaces. But a wall of folding windows might make it feel more like an extension of the home. In creating the transition from the indoor to the outdoor spaces, especially with multilevel homes, many designers have found pergolas to be their friend. They provide some room delineation and are an easy way to light the space, especially early and late in the year when daylight is short. The key is to make the outdoor space feel like part of your home and not a part of your yard.
Hiring a Professional
Don’t hire a professional based solely on job title (architect, builder, landscape architect, interior designer, etc.). There are many construction professionals with the credentials necessary to design and build your outdoor kitchen — they just need to be a creative professional with some understanding of residential design and construction. But that is not enough.
Hiring the “right” person (“right” is someone who thinks design first) is more important than hiring a particular professional title. You’re looking for someone who takes a holistic approach to the project, including the design of the landscape and interior spaces. Your designer should either have this expertise internally or have working partnerships with other professionals who have the skills not available internally.
When you are interviewing firms, take a look at their past outdoor kitchen projects. You’ll find them on their website, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. Ask them about these projects. Inquire if they will arrange for you to see one or two of these past projects in person. Remember, you’re looking for the “right” firm, the one with a good deal of successful experience delivering holistic solutions for their clients.
How to Budget
For a small luxury outdoor kitchen, expect to invest somewhere between $35,000 and $45,000. A typical project could average $60,000 to $65,000, but it can increase to as much as $150,000 for larger kitchens.
Remember, although the typical homeowner who builds an outdoor kitchen receives a return on that investment of 100% or more, you don’t want to overspend the other homes in the neighborhood. So, if you invest $320,000 in your outdoor kitchen but homes similar to yours are currently selling for $400,000, you may have to delay selling the property for a while to allow the local real estate market to catch up with your investment.
This means it’s a good idea to talk to a residential real estate agent before you begin designing the project. A realtor can give you an idea of what you can expect to receive if you were to sell the property without an outdoor kitchen vs. selling it with one. This exercise will help you determine the right amount to invest in designing and building your outdoor kitchen.
If you like do-it-yourself projects, you may be thinking you can take on this project yourself. However, even with some construction knowledge and past experience, many homeowners find that hiring a professional to help guide them through the design and buildout of their outdoor kitchen offers great value.
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