Some used to think designing a kitchen was all about aesthetics, ergonomics and craftsmanship. It is about something else less tangible, which amounts to understanding what environments make people feel happiest at home: a move from the outer world inwards.
The secret to a practical kitchen is a compact cooking zone, as this allows enough space to be available to fulfil the room’s expanded role as a ‘living’ space. Focusing on the room’s culinary effectiveness is no longer enough. A space once dedicated exclusively to cooking, clearing up and food storage is now a heavily-used social area that is also an emotional sanctuary, with an umbilical cord to the garden. We also used to pull down the walls during expansion; now, we add fold-back doors to bring in nature. Most communal life talks place in the kitchen: conversations around the table, prep, using laptops, dumping books and toys, listening to music and the radio, perching, cooking, snacking, polishing shoes, charging phones, mending bicycles and doing the ironing. Slowly we are expanding outdoors too.
We think that every house needs to be an open, flexible room where encounters can be turned into effective exchanges. A host of different activities can accommodate.
