Tea time! An alt. multifunctional dining space in a zakka cottage home

541

Rustic Chic
HDB (BTO)
~900 sqft
3 br
Couple Living

Welcome back to @ahirisecottage! The prompt for this post was "a multi-functional dining space", which our living-dining space, featured in our previous post, fits the bill of. Not wanting to put you through a repeat of that, we thought to show you our alternative dining space: our kitchen counter/tea corner, which you encounter as you step through our home's entrance. This is the spot in our house with the strongest "English cottage" flair with the plate-rack-and-tea-cabinet combo (we legitly keep tea and coffee in this cabinet!) against a faded climbing olives backdrop, which we sourced from Sandberg, a Swedish wallpaper designer.
The vintage refurbished roti shelf, displaying S's handmade ceramics and travel finds collection takes pride of place on the island countertop. In fact, there's more display space here than we had originally planned, with a glass-door shelf built into the front of our kitchen island to showcase gifts, vintage tableware and plushies. Aside from being used as a food prep space and holding are for parcels, we sometimes have drinks at our island with friends when we're hosting larger groups. To achieve the old-school zakka kitchen style, we requested for a tongue-and-groove lookalike finish for the sides of our kitchen counters and island, taking inspiration from deVOL's Sebastian Cox Kitchen.
As this is the one space in our home that is rarely airy, S found a small rechargeable camping fan that can be used during food prep or when having quick drinks. We wanted to avoid having standing or corner ceiling fans cluttering up the space further, though we're sometimes envious when we see our friends homes with more cooling solutions.
The top of our half-galley cart (formerly used in service on a Singapore Airlines plane!) is used as a catch-all for our utensils and coffee making paraphernalia.
What cottage kitchen is complete without adorable pendant lamps? We went with filament bulbs that cast a warm, cosy light upon the knick-knacks. At night, with some lofi chill music playing from our TV, some lovely maple scented candle burning, we lounge about with mugs in our hands and imagine the woods creeping in.