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

In The End of the Land, David Grossman writes:

At 7:30 in the evening she stands cooking in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, for lyric effect, the floral apron of a real, hardworking, eager housewife: a chef. Piping hot pots and pans dance on the stove top, steam curls up to the ceiling and thickens into aromatic clouds, and Ora suddenly knows that everything will work out.

She plunges into battle with her winning combination: Ariela’s Chinese chicken strips with vegetables….Persian rice with raisins and pine nuts….she moves between the oven and the stove top with unexpected gaiety, and for the first time since Ilan left… she feels a sense of affection and belonging to a kitchen, even this old-fashioned, grubby kitchen, which now approaches her tentatively and rubs up against her with its damp snouts of serving spoons and ladles…Piled on the table behind her are covered bowls of eggplant salad, cabbage salad, and a large colourful chopped vegetable salad, into which she has snuck slices of apples and mango… and tabbouleh. She has arrived at the moment when all the dishes have been sent on their way: cooking on the stove top, baking in the oven, bubbling in the pans. They don’t need her any longer. But she still needs to cook.

There is a problem that requires a solution, but she does not understand what it is, and she hurries back to the pots’ thick breath. She does not taste the food…She watches her hand move wildly over a pot, showering its contents with paprika. There are particular movements that always make the phone ring. She noticed this odd conjunction a long time ago: when she seasons food, or when she wipes a pot or pan dry after washing it….Something in these circular motions seem to bring it to life.

Grossman brings the kitchen to life, merging what is going on in Ora’s head with her body and why she cooks – as an expression of love, for therapy and creative satisfaction. An immersion in the colour, aromas and expectation of eating, all without too much thinking. It shows how integrated the process of cooking is with our consciousness and moods, all the way from well-being to worry. There is no mention of efficiency or ergonomics, but there is a sense that she loves being in the kitchen. Her body moves around effortlessly, without too much self-direction. It is a safe place for her to be in relation to the world and it accommodates her cooking and serving up of food to the point where it feels like a place for occupation and contemplation.

There are many motivations for being a kitchen. A key one is nurturing. Domestic duties can turn from obligations to offerings if we can relax and converse with others. Visitors become roommates through easy eye contact or and allowing freeform thoughts to circulate through our consciousness creates a kind of personal meditation. The 1950s image of the suburban housewife and her lonely obligations to service the family is long gone. The kitchen described in Grossman’s passage is a real living space.

Sadly, not every family has the space, resources or mentality for this kind of kitchen. One feels Ora’s kitchen is not an expensive to make, but it needs ingenuity, maybe a little inclination to DIY, and most definitely owners with the right sensibilities. In my opinion, most high end modern kitchens are not an enlightened spaces, but at least  design trends in magazines now show kitchens as being sociable places, not back room dungeons or cheerless box-rooms with utilitarian units around the wall.  Cookery programmes, for all their dubious glamour, have given the kitchen an enjoyment-come-living -status that was not historically seen in its 19th and mid-to-late 20th century predecessors.

David Grossman writes eloquently about something more crucial – its emotional value. His stream of consciousness writing reminds one of what really goes on in our emotional lives, with the constant need to keep our spirits up. A kitchen should be planned not just with style and function in mind but also as a place that one occupies for emotional recharging.

Editor’s note: You can read Johnny’s previous post on The End of the Land here.

Photograph of communal kitchen at Goats with Wind farmhouse in Galilee, by Katherine Grey.

Throughout 2011, I will be quoting passages from contemporary fiction, as I come across them, on kitchens and interior spaces, selected for how they encourage emotional engagement with kitchens and interiors and engender a sense of belonging. They will show how houses and interiors can be more than just shelter, clever design or good investments.

In The End of the Land (2010), author David Grossman describes Avram’s house, near Jerusalem, into which the protagonist has recently moved:

The house itself was finely attuned to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy’. A place on the edge of becoming a real home.  Ora felt that Ilan (her husband and mutual friend of Avram) was  ‘content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste – meaning her assortment of tastes – was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him’…. Her voice pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio, like someone opening a window…. she needs talk, a human voice.

This passage shows how home owners embed their emotional experiences in their surroundings and make a subliminal investment in the fabric of their rooms, which is so hard to achieve via straight design. To some extent it is inevitable that with time and thought, but transference of this kind can be encouraged by avoiding too much built-in furniture, non-ageing surfaces, single style aesthetics and making visible items that tell of the owner’s life story. Above, this personal story is told through Ora’s personal assortment of tastes, a comfortable unkemptness, compatibility with different moods, the penetration of daylight. She also needs opportunity for eye contact that will allow for sociability and conversation.

By creating furniture with character, avoiding uniform design, encouraging cooking counters that face into the room, adding playful details and the qualities of handmade finishes, accepting the quirkiness of old buildings and not trying to correct every defect, there is room for these mental activities to occur. All of these design features assist in showering the fabric of the house with sparks of connectivity, constant mini-electrical shocks that massage your feet, or soft hooks that attach your brain cells to the circuit that says “I belong.”  At JGS we hope our kitchen and living spaces encourage these subliminal processes but have yet to record them, particularly in the extraordinary moving way that David Grossman has done in this book.