This title by Nancy Hiller is must read for anyone interested in American kitchens. It works on several levels. There is the story of the kitchen coming out of the closet of domestic slavery into the modern world of sociability and prestige ownership, an example of what happens when capitalism is applied to a domestic room, and the tale of the twentieth-century kitchen seen through the eyes of marketing and advertising, with its media messages and imagery. Finally my favourite – it identifies the precursors of the unfitted kitchen or the joint use of design and furniture-making to create a domestic room that can be comfortable, accommodating and effective.

Nancy Hiller is a rare beast of a cabinet maker, scholar and writer. She uses the Hoosier cabinet as a lens for social history. As a multi-purpose piece of furniture that claimed it could enable you to do almost everything you ever need to in a kitchen without moving a step, even saving up to 1592 steps in one day. Depending on what year you were in or what marketing message was being promoted, it might help the housewife to ‘stay young’, ‘abolish (household) slavery’ or be the best gift a father could give to his daughter to teach her how to cook. Its local setting is Indiana, where they had manufactured over a million cabinets and created hundreds of jobs by 1916. But its really a story of early twentieth-century America and the drive for efficient production, provision of mass furnishing, expectations of  consumer comfort alongside the gradual commercialisation of the kitchen industry. 

By 1933, the Hoosier cabinet was considered old fashioned and its decline was inevitable. Its legacy is both charming and valuable: antique hunters chase down  Hoosier cabinets as desirable gems for their contemporary kitchens, but best of all they remain an iconic reminder that there is an alternative to continuous counters, the American name for the ubiquitous fitted kitchens that most people have had to put up with in Britain and Europe. That is the price you pay for allowing commerce to run or rule the industry rather than designers and householders - in other words, human beings with emotional needs and a desire for comfort.

The Hoosier Cabinet in kitchen history. Nancy R Hiller. Indiana University Press 
ISNB 978-0-253-31424-6

Wonderfully worn.

No, I’m not thinking of old clothes, or those Van Gogh boots that have become such old friends they can’t be thrown out. Instead, I was contemplating how narrow cobbled streets, wobbly medieval buildings, ancient cathedrals with worn away stone thresholds are gateways to a history more tangible than words in books.   

Antique furniture, old tools, hand-me-down toys, and objects from every oeuvre of domestic life resonate because they have a story to tell. Like a 3D painting of time and use, they are a record of personal history, through their self-evident wear, repair, abuse and care.

The current obsession of keeping things shiny new, with materials, like plastic coating, that don’t age and are hard to maintain when they fail, needs challenging. Expectation of maintenance means you keep an eye on furniture, respect windows and floors, encourage a relationship between the user and the artefact. Repairs contribute. The skill of hardworking hands and the receipt of handed-down practice add layers of history to the objects we use. 

It would be ideal to select materials for their ease to work, as well as their capacity to grow old with grace. Green thinking accepts ageing; natural materials do it better than man made. Unless things return to earth or degrade, then they can’t be recycled. They end up in landfills and deprive future generations of resources. Green thinking should embrace a philosophy of maintenance and celebrate the aesthetics of wear.

In Wahi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, Leonard Koren writes: ‘Things Wahi Sabi are expressions of time frozen and made of materials that are visibly vulnerable to the effects of weathering and human treatment. They record the sun, wind, rain, heat and cold in a language of discoloration, rust, tarnish, stain,warping, shrinking, shrivelling and cracking.’

How beautifully expressed and relevant to today’s fake consumerist values of obsolescence.