I once lived in a flat where the kitchen and the living room shared a single square of parquet roughly the size of a large rug. Every meal prep felt like a dance around the sofa, and when my mother came to visit, she slept on an inflatable mattress that deflated by 3 a.m. That is when I learned that a fitted kitchen does not have to be just for chopping onions. With a bit of clever layout planning, the same cabinetry that holds your Le Creuset pots can also swallow an entire guest bed. The trick is to think of your kitchen joinery as a system for living, not just for cooking.

The core problem with small floor plans is that you want both a proper kitchen and a real place for guests to sleep, but you have no spare room. The solution lives in the gap between your wall units and your base cabinets. I have installed a few kitchens where we replaced a standard tall larder cabinet with a housing unit for a fold-down bed with storage.