Love me a closed kitchen. Cooking in the living room is very caveman to me.

Well, there are a variety of things you can do. Half walls, interleaved frosted glass panels where the backsplash used to be....on and on.

The whole open concept house thing has gone too far off the deep end into loony bin territory. In my opinion, fully open concept kitchens are for people who don't actually USE their kitchen. They want it to be there and look pretty. If you actually have friends over and entertain regularly and you are the one cooking, do you want everyone to sit and look at the piles of dirty dishes while you socialize? No.

If you have small children you may want to have an open kitchen to living just so you can see them. That never really was a concern to me but it seems most people want that with small children. 13 years ago we built a kitchen open to living and dining. While I love it I'll have a closed kitchen in our new build. The open living area was loud to me and the smells did go into the other part of the house. Sometimes the smell was really good and sometimes the smell was not so good I also felt like I always had to have the kitchen in good shape in case someone made a surprise visit.

Just depends on preferences, lifestyle, who you live with, etc.

It is just my husband, the cat, and me, and since we choose to live in a smaller space and are rather informal, I prefer an open kitchen plan.

Our work hours differ so it allows us to spend time together in the same “room” and chat even when we are not synced in terms of schedules - for example when I am eating dinner as I just got home and he is relaxing and reading on a couch. We have lived in a less open plan last few years and I am really looking forward to returning to a more open plan again.

Noise is not a factor for us. Cooking...maybe we don’t cook enough smelly, greasy food, but using a good hood fan makes a difference.