Literature is very much a source of inspiration for the kitchens we design at Johnny Grey Studios, whether to conjure creativity or explore how the latest neuroscience research might affect kitchen design. Here’s a list of several food and garden books Johnny has picked up this year, and he recommends you do the same. (And if you missed this last year, make sure to check out Johnny’s Most Delicious Reads from 2010.)

Since our outdoor kitchen for Alitex was opposite Cleve West’s show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, Johnny decided to go to Cleve’s talk about his new book Our Plot at Petersham Nurseries, near Richmond. Starting out gardening an allotment, Cleve ended up living there during the day, cooking and eating in a simple but sociable way with his newly-found extended family of gardeners. Our Plot details this with charm.

Dan Pearson’s newly published Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City is garden writing verging on poetry with photography to match. Colour in the Garden by Val Bourne, a subject Johnny always wants to learn more about, is very useful. Nicole de Vésian Gardens: Modern Design in Provence by Louisa Jones is inspirational and, from the English side of the Channel, a pleasurable fantasy.

There are two pillars of modern eating, according to Adam Gopnik author of The Table Comes First: the restaurant and the recipe.  We’d like to add a third, the sociable home kitchen, which captures our core idea of kitchen design based on instinct.

Build your own bread oven: Johnny’s family did. Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer is about the one most worth having, simply produced and usable.

Egon Ronay, a biography edited by JGS client Peter Bazalgette, is the story of a Hungarian immigrant succeeding in bringing food awareness to a grim post-war Britain, which probably suffered one of the worst dearths of decent ingredients and cooking in modern peacetime.

At Elizabeth David’s Table. Though written almost sixty years ago, these recipes stand out. They are delicious, authentic to their country of origin, and take us armchair travelling to the ‘blessed sun and shores of the Mediterranean’, as Elizabeth says. Johnny keeps it by his stove.

Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker’s roving food writer, has just written the most lively and enjoyable food book of the year, The Table Comes First. His elegant and original, punchy observations follow the subtitle: Family, France, and the meaning of food. Except it doesn’t quite. Fergus Henderson, the British restaurateur and campaigner for eating the whole animal, provides the title. ‘ I don’t understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television, don’t they know the table comes first?’ Perfectly put.

Kitchen making begins by placing the table in front of a window with the best view. Sanity begins when you sit down to eat. The world with all its distractions and bad news is suddenly at bay, sidelined, on hold. A sense of relief gives way to the prospect of sociability, warm words (you can hope for with reason although it does not always work out) and tasteful pleasures. The table represents the aura of family and customs of civilization, whatever the culture or ethnic tribe you belong to Even if it’s a small table – and in some ways this is more intimate, no kitchen should be without one. It might even be worth thinking about two smaller tables – one is often in use as a non-food shuffle of books, papers, laptops and objects of daily life, like a clearing station for in transit. Having two tables saves clearing up every time you want to eat. For our own home I would rather sacrifice countertop space and make sure we were properly tabled-up. I try to persuade clients of this, though not usually successfully!

Raising the status and respect for the table and what it represents to the household and the value of eating together, whether once a day or regularly during the week, gets my vote.

It took me 14 years to meet landscape designer John Brookes. We were both writing books for the same publisher when our editor suggested they could combine our books to produce the ultimate outside and inside guide to home design. It never happened, sadly.

John lives 15 miles from me near Chicester, with a studio at the centre of Denmans Garden, one of his own creations that is also open to the public. He has now published 24 books. It all started with Room Outside (1969), which has just been republished. Despite being over 40 years old, it’s the best book on the market about the using garden space to really live in. We can use our outdoors more fully if the integration of house and garden is planned well. The space surrounding a building (known as a “transition zone”) - whether terrace, courtyard, patio or veranda - is often seen as a buffer zone for circulation, kept free of trees to avoid the mess of leaf fall, branch damage and disturbance to foundations or simply out of fear of damaging wall surfaces. Buildings, especially houses, need the softening impact of nature or they can look forbidding, with hard edifices that make too much impact for domestic comfort.

Inevitably, in North America and warmer climates the transition zone is more effectively used for outdoor living. In the UK, we sometimes need to be reminded of our natural instincts to be outdoors and enjoy the efforts of our gardening labours. John points this out in this influential first book, explaining how to do this in an easy-to-access way with soft and hard surfacing, planting design, ground shaping and drainage, special features, garden furnishings. In short, he tells us how to make an outdoor room.

John has the look of someone who lives his own philosophy, rugged and weather-beaten due to a life spent outside As I discuss these things, I want to get out and be doing that now. Planting plants that we can see, smell, be near. Enjoying their scale, shape and experience their biological detail, not to mention the comparative colour, texture and shape. Standing back you realize that the assemblages we put together whilst making our gardens are truly awe-inspiring in their variety.

John recently judged the Slant Landscape Awards. The winners’ ideas, he told me, filled him with optimism. “River-Some” from South Korea and “Parque Del Delta” from Argentina. And a new online garden design school allows you to access John’s knowledge first hand.  For a modest sum you can download videos and learn garden design from the master - from the comfort of your kitchen table.