How Open‑Plan Living is Knocking Down the Walls of Asian Kitchens
Updated: Jul 15
Japan, China, and Vietnam: From a Place to Cook to the Heart of the Home
July, 2026
Cha Collective
The kitchen was once purely a place to make food. A backstage space, tucked behind walls and kept well out of sight. That role has shifted significantly in the west, and some Asian markets are following the same direction. Across Japan, China, and Vietnam, the kitchen and dining area has evolved from a closed and functional food preparation space to a place where families gather, cook together, and build their lives around.
In our recent studies at Cha Collective, we explored with our client how people across these three countries think about cooking..While all three markets are moving toward more open kitchens, the motivations, the pace of change, and the direction of evolution vary completely, shaped by the unique history and food culture of each place.
Japan: The Aesthetics of Open Storage, and How Open-Plan Living Created a Distinctly Japanese Evolution
Given the limited space most Japanese households face, the early shift to open-plan kitchens was perhaps inevitable. Integrating the kitchen, dining area, and living room into a single space took hold early as a way to make the most of limited floor space, and today open-plan layouts are effectively the standard in new Japanese homes.
Yet the spread of open-plan design produced a paradox unique to Japanese kitchens. Japan traditionally has an idea of ichiju-sansai (一汁三菜), the basic meal structure of rice, soup, and three side dishes, which naturally requires a wide variety of tableware and cooking tools for any given meal. The food culture of valuing shun (旬), or seasonal freshness, further encourages different utensils and vessels by season: glassware for summer, earthenware pots for winter, bamboo steamers in spring. The accumulation of things in the kitchen is almost impossible to avoid. Yet in an open-plan kitchen, there are simply not enough walls to provide extensive, enclosed storage.
From this reality of many things and nowhere to hide them emerged the aesthetic known as mise-ru shuno (見せる収納), or display storage. Favourite vessels arranged on open shelves, frequently used tools hung on the wall, the textures of everyday life elevated into curated displays. Matching tones through colour and material, choosing accent pieces with care; the aspiration for a kitchen that is eclectic yet never chaotic was born from this specific intersection of Japan's housing conditions and food culture.
In recent years, this aesthetic of display storage has gained a new dimension: materials. Tile, plaster, timber, iron, glass blocks: where concrete and wood were once the standard pairing, kitchens now incorporate a far wider range of materials with distinct character. Advances in material technology have made it possible to reinterpret classic textures in contemporary ways, and a clear preference for the authentic texture of the material itself, rather than plastic, has taken hold.
“Mixing materials has become very common. In the past, a kitchen might be built entirely around two materials: concrete and wood. Now it is more typical to use plaster on the walls, brick in the bathroom, tile in the kitchen, and so on. As material technology advances, the range of options grows, and there is an increasing tendency to take classic textures and rework them in a contemporary way. Plastic is being avoided; the trend towards preferring the genuine texture of glass, stone, metal, and timber is only getting stronger.”
S.T. / Architectural Producer, Japan
If display storage is about how one organises the presence of everyday life, the eclectic layering of materials is about how a space feels. A kitchen where textured plaster walls, warm solid timber, and industrial iron coexist carries a human warmth and richness that no uniformly plastic finished kitchen can offer. This eclectic sensibility, where abundance never tips into disorder, is a value that Japanese kitchens have cultivated, quietly and distinctively, over a long time.
China: How Innovation Opened the Kitchen Doors for a Culture Built on Cooking with Flame
Versatility is central to everyday cooking in Chinese households. It is common for a single meal to involve the four main cooking methods (蒸 煮 炒 炸), steam, boil, stir‑fry and deep‑fry, sometimes all at once. Similar to Japan, Chinese families typically expect (四菜一湯), four dishes and one soup. However, unlike Japan, cold or raw dishes are rare, and every course is expected to reach the table at the same time, hot and carrying the taste of flame.
Yet this culture of cooking with flame has long imposed significant constraints on the kitchen. The heavy fume (油煙) produced by authentic Chinese cooking presents a real challenge for odour control and cleaning if the kitchen is not closed off from the dining and living spaces. Gas company regulations in many regions have required a physical barrier between the gas hob and the dining area for safety reasons. The fact that Chinese kitchens remained closed workspaces for so long was the inevitable outcome of this combination of cooking culture and regulatory constraint.
That consensus is now beginning to shift. As a strong aspiration for Western style open kitchens grows, alongside a rapidly rising desire for the social experience of cooking and eating in the same shared space with family and friends, technological and design innovation is catching up. Seamless built-in kitchens that block oil smoke while creating visual continuity with the dining area, and sliding or folding doors that satisfy regulations while generating a sense of openness, are both gaining wide adoption.
“In China, gas company regulations mean that a fully open-plan layout is still not possible in many regions. However, those regulations no longer apply in Shanghai, and there is a strong likelihood that other regions will see relaxation in the future. There are also many workarounds, and a lot of people are using sliding or folding doors to meet the requirements.”
M. │ Interior Designer, China
Driving this shift from the technology side is a wave of innovation from China's own kitchen appliance brands. Fotile and Robam have developed products specifically designed for the challenge of cooking authentic Chinese food in an open kitchen. The most notable example is the integrated cooking centre (集成烹饪), which combines the range hood and hob into a single unit and captures oil smoke at the point of generation, making open-plan layouts genuinely viable. The wider adoption of induction hobs is also helping to reduce smoke, and growing awareness that well-controlled induction cooking can now approach the character of wok hei is gradually gaining credibility.
The confluence of regulatory relaxation and technological innovation holds the potential to fundamentally reshape the Chinese kitchen. A format born from millennia of cooking culture, namely the closed kitchen, is now being pushed open by admiration for the West and a longing for shared meals around a common table. This change is not simply an interior design trend; it reflects a deeper shift in how Chinese people think about who they eat with, and how.
Vietnam: How the Kitchen Shifted from a Messy Back‑Room to a Social Hub in Multigenerational Homes
In Vietnam, the kitchen was once unambiguously a workspace. The ideal was a clear functional division between a wet kitchen, handling the labour intensive food preparation of sorting herbs, trimming meat, and simmering broths for hours, and a dry kitchen for storage and lighter preparation work. Its character as a place that gets dirty was strongly embedded in the culture, and it was taken for granted that the kitchen should be physically separated from the living and dining areas at the heart of the home.
However, that idea is now a thing of the past, and kitchens are undergoing a major transformation.
“In homes with generous space, it is still possible to have a clear zone separation between a wet kitchen and a dry kitchen. But that arrangement is only found at the very top end of the market nowadays: homes with private chefs, villas, that kind of setting.”
H.L. │ Founder, Architecture & Interior Design Media, Vietnam
Several overlapping social shifts are driving the change. As the middle class has expanded on the back of economic growth, younger generations have been moving into new urban condominiums that offer convenience and security. Unlike the wide footprint multigenerational townhouses of the past, condominiums require the kitchen, dining, and living areas to be contained within a compact floor plan, which leaves little room for the idea of walling off the dirty area. For a generation that has studied abroad, travelled internationally, or simply absorbed Western lifestyles through social media on a daily basis, the open kitchen in which family and friends cook together has become a symbol of a desirable life.
As the shift from multigenerational households to smaller nuclear families accelerates, the kitchen that once needed to function as a large production facility for many mouths is being reimagined as a living space where two or three people can naturally come together.
Particularly interesting is that this shift is beginning to reshape even the structure of the distinctly Vietnamese multigenerational townhouse. In these homes, where each generation traditionally occupies a separate floor, the kitchen was historically fixed on the ground floor. Increasingly, new layouts are placing the kitchen on the middle floor of the building. By positioning the kitchen where every generation can access it easily, a natural flow of interaction is created while privacy across floors is maintained. The idea of placing the kitchen at the centre of the home is now reshaping the very structure of the traditional Vietnamese multigenerational house too.
A Shared Shift: Three Separate Journeys, One Open Kitchen
The shared theme across Japan, China and Vietnam is that the kitchen is no longer a functional utility room to be hidden behind the scenes. It has become an emotional hub at the centre of family connection.
Yet the motivations behind this, the speed at which it is happening, and the direction in which it is heading are entirely different across the three countries. In Japan, the meeting of compact living and a rich food culture created a unique display‑storage aesthetic, and open‑plan living, already widespread, continues to grow from that foundation. In China, the closed kitchen, a form born from millennia of high heat cooking culture, is now being pushed open by a wave of technological innovation, admiration for the West, and a longing for communal mealtimes. In Vietnam, a shift in mindset; redefining the kitchen from a ‘place where one gets dirty’ to a ‘place where the family gathers’; combined with the trend towards smaller homes as a result of the rise of the nuclear family, is leading to the rapid adoption of open-plan layouts.
For brands looking to connect meaningfully with Asia’s kitchen and dining markets, surface trends like open‑plan living are only the starting point. The deeper work is understanding why kitchens were closed in each country, and what is now motivating them to open, which is key to grasping what consumers genuinely want.
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