Planning the Rooms: Kitchen, Bath, Bed, Work

The instinct is to open a floor plan and start dropping in sofas. Resist it. Space planning begins with relationships - which spaces want to be near which - and only later with the actual shape of the room.

Draw each space as a loose circle: kitchen, dining, living, parents' room, kids' room, puja, bath, balcony. Now draw lines between the circles that belong together. Kitchen wants to touch dining. The parents' bedroom wants to sit away from the living-room television noise. The puja space wants its own calm zone, traditionally toward the north-east. A guest toilet wants to be reachable from the living area without marching visitors past the bedrooms.

This is a bubble diagram - an adjacency map. It is deliberately ugly and out of scale, because its only job is to get the relationships right. Fix those first, and fitting them into the real walls becomes a puzzle with the answer already half-solved.

The kitchen is the hardest-working room in an Indian home, so it gets the most precise rule: the work triangle. Draw a line between your three work centres - the sink (washing), the stove or cooktop (cooking) and the fridge (storage). Those three legs form a triangle, and how you size it decides whether cooking feels like a dance or a trek.

Each leg should sit roughly between 1.2m and 2.7m, and the three legs together should total around 3.6m to 6.6m. Too tight and you bump elbows and hot handles; too loose and every dal involves a marathon. Critically, nothing should cut through the triangle - no dining chair, no doorway traffic, no fridge that swings its door into the walk path.

From the triangle flow the standard layouts: single-wall (everything on one run, fine for a compact flat), parallel/galley (two facing runs), L-shape (two adjacent walls, the most common Indian choice), U-shape (three walls, generous and triangle-friendly) and the island (a free-standing block, lovely but only where floor area allows). And remember the Indian split: a ventilated wet kitchen for the masala-heavy, smoke-and-spill cooking, and a tidy dry kitchen for prep, the toaster and serving.

A bathroom feels good or grim based on a few small numbers. Plan it as two zones: a dry zone (the wash basin and WC, which you want to keep splash-free) and a wet zone (the shower or bathing area, ideally screened or stepped). Keeping water in its zone is the single biggest comfort upgrade in an Indian bathroom.

Give each fixture breathing room. A WC wants roughly 350-400mm of clear space on each side from its centreline and around 600mm of clear floor in front. A basin needs about 700mm of standing space in front. The door should swing outward where possible, or at least not foul the WC or basin when opened.

A usable separate toilet can fit in about 0.9m x 1.2m, but a comfortable full bathroom with basin, WC and shower wants closer to 1.5m x 2.1m or more. Below the minimums, every visit becomes a negotiation with the walls.

Start a bedroom from the bed, because everything else orbits it. In India a queen is about 1525 x 1980mm and a king about 1830 x 1980mm - measure your actual bed, because mattress sizes vary by brand.

Now plan the circulation. You want at least 600mm of clear walking space on the sides of the bed you use, and ideally on both sides if two people sleep there - nobody should have to climb over a partner to reach the bathroom at 2am. Leave clear space at the foot for dressing and bed-making.

The wardrobe needs its own clearance: hinged shutters swing out roughly 600mm, so you need that gap in front before they hit the bed. Sliding shutters save that swing space and are the smart pick in a tight room. Check the door swing too - the bedroom door should open against a wall, not into the bed or the wardrobe.

The home office stopped being a luxury and became a room everyone needs. Its dimensions are quiet but real.

A desk surface sits comfortably at about 750mm high for typing. You want roughly 500-650mm between your eyes and the monitor, with the top of the screen near eye level so your neck stays neutral. The chair needs about 900mm of pull-back clearance behind the desk so you can push out and stand without hitting a wall or cupboard.

In a flat, the workstation often borrows a corner of a bedroom or living room - so apply the bubble logic again. It wants daylight and a quiet wall, and it wants to sit away from the television and the kitchen clatter. A desk planned with these few numbers, even in a borrowed corner, becomes a place you can actually concentrate.