In most Dhaka apartments the dining room gets a table, six chairs and a glass showcase pushed into a corner, with the long wall left blank for a picture. This one was planned the other way round. The wall came first, floor to ceiling in crockery cabinetry, and the table was set afterwards to suit what the wall had become.
The reason sits next door. The kitchen is compact, as kitchens in this size of flat usually are, and it cannot hold the crockery a household this size accumulates. Moving all of it out to the dining room is the one decision that makes the kitchen workable, and everything else here follows from it. What was given up is real: roughly a foot of room width, and any chance of hanging something on that elevation.
The cabinetry is built tight to the ceiling with no dust gap above it. Uppers are part clear glass and part smoked, lowers are solid doors, and both runs use the same carcass depth so the face of the wall stays flat from one end to the other. Everyday plates live behind the solid doors at reach height and the pieces worth looking at sit above them. This overlap between kitchen and dining storage is the part of our common space design service that clients underestimate most often.
Cove Light Instead of Spotlights Behind Glass
Spotlights would have been cheaper, easier to wire and simple to aim later. We ran a cove instead, washing light down the cabinet fronts from a recess in the ceiling line. The cost of that is ceiling depth, which is never free in an apartment, and a lighting layout you cannot adjust once the plaster is on. What it buys is an even wash with no hot spots burning across the glass and no reflection bouncing back into the eyes of anyone sitting at the table. Under a run of glass doors, a spotlight shows you the light fitting. A cove shows you the crockery.
Smoked Glass Where Clear Would Have Been Simpler
The second cabinet run uses smoked glass rather than clear, with a strip light under the wall units. Clear glass looks better in a photograph and then demands that everything behind it stays display quality for the next ten years, which no working household manages. Smoked glass softens the contents to a suggestion while still stopping the elevation from reading as a solid block of white doors. The strip lighting underneath turns the counter below into a serving surface at meal times, which is where dishes actually land when food comes out of the kitchen.
A Marble Top Chosen Over Engineered Stone
The table is a six seater with a marble top, and the tan upholstered chairs around it supply the only warm colour in the room. Warmth is rationed carefully through this flat, and outside these chairs it is really only present in the modern parents bedroom design in Bashundhara R/A Block-M. Against a wall of white cabinetry, six tan seat backs do more work than any amount of accessory would.
Engineered stone was the obvious alternative and would have shrugged off turmeric, lemon and cooking oil without complaint. It is also imported, and no local fabricator can re hone it once it dulls. Marble can be lifted, polished and reinstalled by a workshop twenty minutes from the building, which over a twenty year table matters more than stain resistance. Sealing twice a year is what that choice costs, and it is a short job with a bottle of impregnator. Weighing supply chains against finishes like that is routine in our interior design service in Bashundhara.
The Basin That Stayed in the Dining Room
In Bangladeshi homes guests wash their hands before they eat, and they do it in the dining room rather than queueing for a bathroom. That habit is normal here and it is usually handled badly, with a bare basin bracketed to a tiled patch of wall. This one sits on a fluted vanity under a round gold mirror, lit by a crystal drop pendant, and it is detailed as a piece of furniture from top to plinth. The round mirror belongs to the same family as the arched one over the dressing table in the modern girls bedroom design in Bashundhara R/A Block-M. The honest cost is that there is still a basin in a room where people eat, and no amount of joinery makes that disappear.
A Table in the Sightline Rather Than Against a Wall
From the living room television wall you look straight past this table and finish on the arched alcove bench at the far end, which is the longest single view in the 2,000 sq ft Bashundhara R/A Block-M apartment project. Pushing the table against the cabinetry would have freed circulation and killed that view, so it stays out in the middle and one chair pulls back toward the corridor. The rectangular crystal chandelier above it is matched in length to the table rather than centred in the room, because the table is off centre in the plan and a fitting hung to the room instead of the furniture always looks like a mistake. White sideboard cabinetry runs on beside it, with the refrigerator faced into the same line so the appliance sits flush with the doors.
Who This Wall Suits and Who It Does Not
Everything here was bought with that first decision to give a whole wall to storage. It suits a household that cooks daily on gas, hosts monthly, and has a kitchen too small to hold both activities at once. It suits nobody who eats out five nights a week and wanted somewhere to hang paintings. The modern master bedroom design in Bashundhara R/A Block-M took the same argument and applied it to clothing rather than crockery, which tells you the method was consistent across the flat rather than invented for one room.
Is your kitchen too small for what your family actually owns? Call us at 01633-033033 or book a free consultation today.
