Planning an outdoor kitchen
Cooking outside is one of our passions. It combines so many of the things we love: cooking (and eating!), spending time in our garden, entertaining family and friends and fire!
Our love of outdoor kitchens started on our honeymoon in Marrakesh in 2013. The riad where we stayed had a glorious roof terrace that overlooked the medina, with a rustic outdoor kitchen, a wood fired oven and a bar space. It was absolutely magical sitting out there at night, having a drink, or a meal, and soaking up the atmosphere from the medina in the warm night air. The whole space captured our imagination and when we returned to the UK, we wanted to bring a little bit of that magic back with us.
A few years later, in 2015, we built our third show garden at RHS Cardiff, with the brief of creating an edible garden. This was the perfect opportunity to bring back a little bit of the Moroccan magic, adapted to suit a Welsh climate…
Since then, our love for outdoor kitchens has shown no signs of abating, and it’s a bit of a niche for our garden design business. We’ve designed and overseen more than 20 kitchens throughout South Wales in the past few years, in lots of different styles and sizes, ranging from a rustic garden kitchen space with a built-in brick BBQ in Cardiff, to a snazzy, gadget-filled outdoor kitchen in Swansea, perfect for big family parties.
Over the years, we’ve picked up a few ideas about what does and doesn’t make a good useable outdoor space, along with some of the things to consider at the design stage. Here’s our overview to help plan the perfect outdoor kitchen for your garden…
Our show garden at RHS Cardiff in 2015
Choosing the style and design
Just with indoor kitchens, outdoor kitchens can come in all shapes, sizes and designs: from a simple galley design, to an all singing, all dancing covered space filled with gadgets!
But whatever the style and design of the kitchen, the main objective needs to be a space that makes it easy to cook outdoors. Barbecuing and cooking outside is so often perceived as faff: dragging everything in and out of the garage, cleaning it down before you get started, running in and out of the house, and having nowhere to put anything down. But a well-planned outdoor kitchen will include enough space and functionality to make it easy – and enjoyable! – to cook outside, as well as looking great.
When it comes to style, take a look at the rest of your garden, as well as the inside of your house, and tie your outdoor kitchen in with this. Reflect your personality, link the outdoor space to the indoor space, and of course, it always helps to take inspiration from somewhere like Pinterest! We have a whole board for our outdoor kitchen inspo.
What to include?
We’d consider all of these essentials to include in the design:
Counter space at a good working height, with plenty of room to prepare and serve food and drinks
A sink (even if it’s only a cold tap) so you can rinse off your freshly picked garden grown veg, and wash your hands.
Cooking method of choice: gas barbecue, conventional barbecue, big green egg, wood fried pizza oven
If you’ve got the space, then you also might like to think about adding some or all of these, to make the kitchen a real delight to use:
Ledges for resting drinks and nibbles
Bar area with bar stools for friends to sit
A covered structure if you want to use your kitchen in the rain
Accessories like drinks fridges, cupboards, shelves, outdoor power sockets
Where to site the kitchen?
When choosing where to locate the kitchen in the overall garden, an immediate reaction is often put it close to the house – possibly right by the indoor kitchen. This can work well (and does make carrying plates outside that bit easier!) but a kitchen can also work just as well set slightly further away from the house too. Creating a completely separate zone further down the garden makes a distinct zoned space that can feel set away from the everyday world.
Another good tip when choosing the location is to think about the times of day you’re most likely to use the kitchen (after work evening meals, or weekend lunches? Breakfast outside in the summer?) and check where the sun sits in the garden in those times. If you’re thinking of middle of the day meals in the height of Summer, it can be worth choosing a shadier spot. For evening meals, it’s glorious to sit in the areas of the golden setting sun.
In our own garden in Swansea, our kitchen area is about halfway down the length of the garden (approximately 15m from our back door) located in a spot that catches the evening sun. As cooking is our passion, the kitchen is the focal point of the whole garden, all of the other elements (the seating area and fire place, hot tub and dining area) are all designed around it.
Should the kitchen be covered?
This is another big consideration and something we always discuss with our clients. Should the kitchen be covered or not?
When making a decision about this, it helps to think about how often you plan to use it. Will you be outside year-round, or mostly in the summer? And how much rain do you get where you live? Here in Wales, rainfall is pretty much guaranteed, whatever the season! We have an open kitchen, but a covered seating and dining area right opposite, which we often use to eat in (and work in) when the rain is falling.
If you are covering the kitchen, consider what to use. It can be a permanent structure or removable. Something that protects from rain, or something that provides shade (or both…) If you’re planning a permanent structure, then ventilation needs to be planned in right from the beginning.
Temporary structures, such as sail shades or canopies, can be a good “in between” option – providing a small amount of cover for light rain, and shade from intense sun, but easily removable if needed.
What to cook on?
There is a huge range of outdoor cooking equipment, almost to the point of overwhelm if you’re trying to choose what to include! Options range from rustic to incredibly fancy and high tech.
We always love to cook with real fire, whether that’s charcoal, wood, smoke or an open flame. Nothing beats the flavour of wood smoked food.
This is a quick overview of some of the most popular:
Built in barbecues
Barbecues are still one of the most popular choices for outdoor kitchens. Having a built in model makes using them far easier, and if you connect up gas, it’s extremely simple cooking too!
Choosing charcoal or gas is really a question of preference. Some people swear by the smoky flavour of the charcoal, others prefer the easy of just switching on a flame. If you do choose gas, you can usually connect them to your home gas supply, so you don’t need to bring in any huge gas bottles.
Black Knight supply excellent and affordable DIY barbecue kits (starting from around £60). At the other end of the spectrum, Fire Magic have an amazing range fo all singing all dancing built in gas BBQs, which start from about £4,000.
Wood fired ovens
We love cooking with a wood fire. Our garden has a wood fired pizza oven, and it is just amazing. It takes a little while to get used to it – as with anything cooked with fire, it’s more of an art than a science, so practice helps to get the timings exactly right. But it’s worth the effort as the taste of freshly cooked pizza is out of this world!
Because the pizzas cook so fast (less than two minutes once the oven is hot enough) you can easily feed a crowd quickly, which makes it brilliant for parties.
Pizza ovens don’t only need to be used for pizza. You can use them to bake cakes and bread, or even cook a whole roast dinner!
There is a massive range of different options on the market to suit all budgets. Take a look at the Stone Baked Oven Company, who have a range of different options and sizes, starting at £800, and going up to £2,500. You can even make a DIY one yourself using clay. Check out the cob oven project (http://thecobovenproject.blogspot.com) for very detailed instructions.
Ceramic barbecues
Ceramic barbecues have massively grown in popularity recently. They combine modern cooking techniques with the design of a Japanese kamado cooking pot. There are several of these weird and wonderful contraptions on the market, but ‘Big Green Egg’ are the market leaders. We have one in our garden and we love to cook on it.
The oven is really versatile as the temperature can be controlled precisely – so you can grill like a barbecue, bake and roast like an oven or smoke “low and slow” like a smokehouse.
They are available in a range of size and price options, from around £800-£3,000.
What else to include?
For a fully stocked outdoor kitchen, include cupboards or shelves to store separate plates and cooking utensils. Open shelves can look great, but do tend to get dirty quickly, especially as they’re outside. Closed cupboards protect the contents far more effectively. For dinnerware, we always use and recommend Falcon enamelware, which looks great, is easy to clean and won’t break if dropped!
Spare cupboard space to store other bits and pieces is helpful to keep the area looking clean. This could include ice buckets for parties (we love galvanised tubs for this), a bin and recycling bags, and a few boxes that you can stack things in, such as empty glasses, helps to make clean up after parties much easier.
An outdoor power socket is an incredibly handy addition. Festoon lighting can be plugged in, or even a waffle maker for an epic brunch!
