Outdoor kitchen in Windermere, Lake District

This outdoor kitchen is at a wonderful, contemporary home with views across England’s largest and most-celebrated lake – a muse that has inspired the likes of Wordsworth, Turner and Constable with its “universe of Nature’s fairest forms”. The architect here has worked with local stone and clean porcelain lines to create orderly structure and shape, then juxtaposed it with sweeping grass banks, flowing curves and the natural undulations of the surrounding terrain. The moody stone contrasts delightfully with the ghostly-white silver birches and the fiery, late-summer blaze of colour from the crocosmias in the border. We can think of few better places to spend an evening. Or, for that matter, a morning:

“We use it loads… we even do breakfast on it because it’s so good to cook outside… We just adapt everything to cook on the outdoor kitchen – if we can cook outside, we’ll cook outside!”