To open or not to open interiors, is the question facing many designers and architects these days.

When interior designer Rebekah Zaveloff began work on a kitchen and dining area in a 1937 Tudor in Oak Park, Ill., she struggled with giving the space a sense of modernity that didn’t feel at odds with the home’s traditional style. She also had to undo the havoc wreaked by a previous remodel.

Ms....

To open or not to open interiors, is the question facing many designers and architects these days.

When interior designer Rebekah Zaveloff began work on a kitchen and dining area in a 1937 Tudor in Oak Park, Ill., she struggled with giving the space a sense of modernity that didn’t feel at odds with the home’s traditional style. She also had to undo the havoc wreaked by a previous remodel.

Ms. Zaveloff, who runs Chicago-based KitchenLab Interiors, pressed for an open plan, reassuring the owners—a doctor and a tech employee with two small children—that “they will not feel like they’re sitting in their dining room looking into a messy, practical kitchen.”

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To open the kitchen to the rest of the house, Ms. Zaveloff had to consider flow and family living. “And I had to make sure each room was attractive from every perspective,” she said.

What was perhaps her most ambitious decision was to set up the kitchen in the space that was once the breakfast room and vice versa. “The prior remodel had added an enormous breakfast room with a banquette that took up a ton of room and didn’t really function very well. So, we flipped the kitchen over there,” Ms. Zaveloff said.

Here are some of the design elements of the $200,000 renovation.