Each week I visit my little local library in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Named for a British loyalist and our town’s first private schoolmaster, the library was founded in 1904 by his descendants. There are two bookshelves for fiction and non-fiction with new selections of books hand-picked by the librarians.

While I was browsing the stacks, a book named A Home Afloat by Gary Cookson (Allard and Coles 2008) caught my eye. To my surprise, I realized that one of Johnny Grey’s kitchens graced the cover! I flipped to the chapter on barges and read about ‘Libertijn of Alphen’, a former sailing cargo vessel built in 1910 in the Netherlands. An engine and wheelhouse were added in 1920 and then sometime in the 1970’s, she was shortened and converted for living aboard.

Johnny’s clients had wanted to buy a retirement home in France but couldn’t decide where they wanted to live.  So they built a luxury floating home instead, and kept their options open to move around.  “We have gone from boring live-to-work computer industry types to vagabond gypsies, travelling the European waterways with reckless abandon”, they said.

The ship has a large split-level open plan. The clients wanted the space to be modern and functional with bright colors and natural woods, instead of traditional ship styling. The interior was carefully designed to reflect the art deco feeling of the 1920s.

Both the husband and wife love to cook, so the galley features a commercial six-burner gas cooktop, large gas oven, two refrigerators, freezer, icemaker, dishwasher, and warming drawer. With a full complement of appliances just like a landlocked kitchen, the boat needed designs for economy in storage and practical activity. The same principles of sociability apply, with the cook facing into the cabin. Tighter planning makes distances shorter and every available nook and cranny is utilized. Tapered cabinetry fit between windows and the curving hull. The Island features Johnny’s signature circular drum base cabinet. Cruising on the open seas demands panels that slide, door latches and drawer pin locks, while curved-fronted cabinets support the human body in motion.

The couple has made several trips up and down the Thames, participating in the Thames Traditional Boat Rally. They had crossed the Channel, entering France’s canal system at Calais, and have toured Belgium, the Champagne and Burgundy regions, and down to the Mediterranean through Holland and Germany. At the end of each day after exploring new places, they come home to their own kitchen.  Because they always return to their comfortable home, they never grow weary of travel or feel homesick. You can read more about ‘Libertijn of Alphen’ and see the plan layout in Johnny Grey’s book Kitchen Culture. Check your local library, or ask your bookseller for a copy.

- Chuck Wheelock

Australia is having a world first with a programme for creating kitchens – with veggie gardens - for 191 primary schools with the goal of teaching kids how to cook. The adults are teachers (a few of whom are experts), but chefs are nowhere to be seen. The kids grow the food, choose the menu and serve the meals in imagined restaurants from ethnic cuisines or what inspires them.

Whilst on holiday in Australia last month, I visited the Stephanie Alexander Foundation to see a school kitchen in action. One of the most inspiring developments is that the teachers and kids are using food as a key source of inspiration throughout the curriculum. Need a history lesson? Then what about using a fruit, say an aubergine, or something like pasta and tracking down its story?

I have been helping Lucy Turner, my sister-in-law, create a pioneering kitchen design for Berrima school in NSW. She is applying for a grant to the foundation. We will keep you posted about how it goes. The foundation has received AU$ 12 million to partly fund the programme. Parents and school have to find 50% of the financing, so it becomes a real community effort. Mums and dads are called on to provide practical assistance. I will providing design services free for the first school. Johnny Grey Studios will be examining the difference between a home kitchen and one for kids in large groups. Stay tuned.

During a recent trip to Shanghai, walking through an open site of a high rise development, I was both confronted and confounded by a client’s question regarding the ‘modern’ plan layout. The client could simply not comprehend why anyone would want their kitchen visible to the rest of the living spaces, let alone naked to the eyes of discerning guests. Why showcase the grime, grease and toil? Of course, the environment for consuming food was of critical importance, but the ghastly preparation needed to be concealed at all cost. Such was the Chinese way.

Though whispers of societal change are certainly afoot, I do sense that the open kitchen ideal still remains an enigma in much of the East. The kitchen has always embodied nourishment and prosperity in both the physical and mythical, yet it was all but considered a functional composition within the home. Aesthetics were never set on this particular agenda, it was perhaps more profound than that. History reiterates this notion across the East, where shrines were typically mounted above stoves, a nod to the polytheistic paths that gave a single deity control over the enclosed hearth of the kitchen, the soul of the home.

Indeed, many subscribe to the class system perspective where servants were, and still are, part of the social make-up of the cooking process. Yet this does not address the fact that the lower classes had their cooking zones located in their courtyards, sub-buildings and entry halls.  So what has changed?  As with the West, the modern kitchen of the East is a more cleansed environment, freed from the olfactory oppression of yesteryear.  Refrigeration, running water and ventilation have inevitably brought the kitchen alongside the living room.  There lies now but a single, dividing, illusionary wall.

Technological advances aside, we must also remember that the perception of the Western kitchen changed forever when we were reminded that cooking was both a highly creative and social act, not merely a means to an end. This revolutionary understanding was adapted to all walks of life, not only confined to the whims of the upper classes. Ultimately, the integration of the kitchen into the living room represented a massive pivotal shift. It was and is inextricably linked to the social, innate binding of a family fabric that lies outside of the ethos of workplace.

So is the expanding middle class mindset of the East now perched at this tipping point? Or has the glossy photo spread of a Western lifestyle been thrust upon all as we all grapple with globalization? Perhaps this whole narrative has nothing to do with orientation, but in actuality, a natural evolution of the kitchen and its destined relationship to the family core. Indeed, as the formality of the dining room withered away in the West many years ago, perhaps it is now time for the cloaked kitchen of the East to be celebrated and reclaim its rightful open place in the center of the home.