Beyond the Barbecue

The season is just right for enjoying the outdoors with a stylish al fresco kitchen. Award-winning kitchen designer Deborah Krasner provides the recipe for planning the perfect backyard space.

The furniture, planters, and fireplace in this outdoor space are all white, matching the trim of the house, whereas the color of the weathered decking mimics that of the cedar shakes.
Photo: Eric Roth

Who doesn’t love spending a warm summer night surrounded by friends and family, sipping drinks as dinner sizzles on the grill?

Many of us have dreamed of having the perfect outdoor kitchen to make cooking and entertaining outdoors easier. Now there’s a way to make that dream a reality. Even in New Jersey, where spring and summer merge into a barely three-month-long window, cooking and dining outside have enormous appeal. Creating the perfect outdoor space takes a bit of ingenuity and smart planning. Award-winning kitchen designer Deborah Krasner can help you achieve that goal with this excerpt from her book, The New Outdoor Kitchen: Cooking Up a Kitchen for the Way You Live and Play.—Lauren Payne

The Great Outdoors

These days we all want to cook and live outside for the sheer pleasure of it. Our standards and aspirations have grown into a desire for outdoor kitchens and dining areas that match our homes in quality, style, performance, and attractiveness. Manufacturers have taken note. These days, the equipment available for outdoor living includes restaurant-level, high-BTU gas grills; outdoor refrigerators; sinks of all styles and sizes; task and ambient lighting; stone, tile, and cast-cement counters; and ovens up to the job of cooking everything from bread and pizza to a whole pig. Amenities for outdoor rooms include portable fireplaces and heaters, seating that rivals interior furnishings for comfort and visual appeal, garden structures from gazebos to antique barns and even carpets, and sound systems designed for backyard use. Confronted by all these possibilities, what is a homeowner to do? Where should you begin?

Perfect Planning

The first step is to develop a clear picture of what you want. You can begin with something quite modest, like a patio with a store-bought grill, while planning for growth over time. You can also start modest and stay there, creating an intimate outdoor kitchen that suits your particular needs.

When thinking about what you want, it helps to ask the following questions:

How do you intend to use your outdoor kitchen? Are you going to use the space year-round, during the week as well as on weekends? The more ambitious your cooking, the more space you’ll need for equipment, preparation, and that critical comfort component: a place to hang out while you wait for your meal. Do you plan to do most of your food preparation indoors or out in the yard? If you are prepping food outside, you’ll want counter space and refrigeration. Will the whole family be cooking? Is this going to be an occasional party space or an every-night family-dinner spot? If it’s made for parties, you’ll need to plan lots of counter space and many electrical outlets; for family dinners, you’ll want a close-by eating area.

If your patio parties aren’t complete without the whir of the blender whipping up frozen drinks, then maybe you’ll want a separate bar area, complete with a refrigerator and icemaker. If you want to be able to use this space year-round, you’ll probably want a heater.

How big and permanent a setup do you want? You also need to consider scale: Perhaps you want a large built-in cooking area with seating and/or cooking stations for guests and an even larger dining area. Or perhaps your available space dictates a freestanding grill station and a cozy dining area. Or maybe you’re somewhere in the middle, with hopes of a built-in grill, a sink connected to a hose, and a basic electrical set-up.

Each of these alternatives comes with a very different price tag. For example, a permanent outdoor kitchen equipped with an outdoor fireplace, wood-burning oven, built-in gas grill with side burners, refrigerator, sink with hot and cold water, natural-gas lines for the grill and for gas-fueled tiki torches, electric lighting, finished waterproof cabinetry, stone counters, and professional landscaping can easily run into six figures. In contrast, a kitchen with freestanding equipment (a store-bought grill, prefab wood-fired oven, small outdoor under-counter refrigerator, and freestanding sink) can be located on a deck, concrete slab, or sand-supported pavers, with a garden-hose sink connected to a French drain (gravel under grass) and a pedestal electric outlet for the utilities. Such an outdoor kitchen can work nearly as well as the first example at a fraction of the cost.

When making these decisions, it’s helpful to consider how long you plan to live at your current address.

Think Ahead

Everything doesn’t have to be done all at once. Be honest with yourself about what your priorities are. If your budget doesn’t allow for both, consider which is more important to you: a wood-fired oven or an outdoor fireplace. Will a freestanding fire pit do instead of a fireplace? If a flagstone terrace with surrounding retaining walls is your heart’s desire, then perhaps you can make concessions on equipment, knowing you can upgrade later.

In addition to prioritizing, you’ll want to plan for the future. If you’ve thought ahead, you’ll be able to step up to an outdoor sink, a built-in gas grill, and an outdoor refrigerator several years later without having to, for example, rip out that flagstone patio. So plan for electric, natural-gas, and water lines, as well as lighting, sound systems, heaters, water features, and gas-fueled fireplaces or fire pits. Dream fully and plan efficiently.

Remember, an outdoor space does not exist in a vacuum. It works best if it relates to the shape of your yard or garden, and your home. It should reflect and relate back in terms of style, proportion, scale, design, and materials.

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