The Swenglish Home

A hole in the wall...

When we renovated the kitchen, an old doorway presented us with a small challenge. It had previously already been covered up and filled with shelves and cupboards, but what should we do with it now that the new L-shaped kitchen was going to run along that wall? The popular trend in Sweden to insert an old window in an interior wall kept whispering cajolingly in my ear, but in the end we decided to run the wood panelling behind the tap (to allow it to stand out proudly and deservedly against the white background), and only leave a small hole in the wall.

Man in the house thought this a superbly functional solution and envisaged, I'm sure, all sorts of functional cooking-related items there. Perhaps a toaster (ready to spew crumbs like Pompei ashes), perhaps a salt grinder (the ugly one, with definite spillage risk) or perhaps even the washing-up liquid (green sticky gunge destined to run down the panelling). Woman in the house had a very different plan. We were back to the age-old debate of form over function or function before form.

I will let you judge who scored the hole-in-one on the hole-in-wall.