One of the core tenets of our design philosophy at JG Studios is that a happy kitchen is the central ingredient in the recipe for a happy home. And to create a happy kitchen, you need to cater to the youngest members of the family by creating a safe, warm space where they can learn the joys of preparing food – not to mention the fun of making a mess that mom gets to clean up afterwards! (Can you say “Food fight!”?)

We’ve recently been in touch with chef Dorette Snover, founder and owner of C’est Si Bon cooking school based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She and her husband opened the doors to C’est si Bon after Hurricane Fran destroyed their old kitchen in 1997. When the family completed rebuilding the kitchen the next summer, they invited some of their son’s friends for a week of cooking.

“We combed the nearby woods for blackberries for luscious pies, and took [the kids] on adventures to goat-cheese farms…The last night we invited their parents to come to dinner and enjoy a meal cooked from scratch,” Dorette explains.

That experience led her to a new career in cooking with kids. “Eleven years later, we teach over 160 young people in the Kid-Chef day camps and over 50 in the Teen-Chef tours,” Dorette says.

In addition to residential and day camps in North Carolina, C’est si Bon offers three culinary tours for teens in Provence, the Loire Valley and Paris. Students attend cooking classes with local chefs, shop for ingredients at open-air markets and visit local cheese artisans and beekeepers.

Dorette’s approach to food is reminiscent of our approach to kitchen design, and both of us incorporate philosophies such as the slow food movement into our work. For example, provenance, which is so important to food, applies equally to physical things. Knowing where your furniture is made, being able to see it constructed, using eco-sourced materials, good craftspeople and in preferably smaller, well-managed workshops, applies the Slow Food principles to the making of things. (For more on this subject, see Johnny’s post on “Slow Kitchens”).

We’re putting together some tips on cooking with kids – and how to create kitchens for kids! As one of our clients, Tiffany Wood, told the Financial Times in a recent piece on curvy kitchens (get the whole scoop here), the extra large work spaces we installed in her kitchen lend themselves to family bonding over food: “I have three children and they have countless cousins, and they all love to cook. They come and make pancakes crowded round the great big worktops - I can squeeze in 12 children round those curves.”

Stay tuned for more on how to squeeze more children ’round your own cooking spaces.

In the April issue of the Financial Times’ How to Spend It guide, Katrina Burroughs explores the “crescendo of curves” that she says has been creeping into design vocabulary the last few years. In her article “Arcs de triomphe”, Burroughs includes a quote from one of our favourite clients, Tiffany Wood, who told her about the kitchen we designed for her home in Bath:

Tiffany Wood, an interior designer based in Bath, commissioned her cabinetry from Johnny Grey, the original promoter of the wavy line in kitchen design. Grey’s kitchens start at £75,000 and each is a unique work of ergonomic art. Wood chose a mixture of walnut, sycamore and oak, with polished concrete and lava stone, and asked for ‘curves every which way: vertical and horizontal.’ Thrilled with the result, she says ‘It’s far more relaxing to be in a space where you know you aren’t going to bang into a corner. We have no sharp edges.’

Best of all, she finds the curves lend themselves to her frantic family life, maximising the ratio of work surface to floor space. ‘I have three children and they have countless cousins, and they all love to cook. They come and make pancakes crowded round the great big worktops - I can squeeze in 12 children round those curves.’ Wood adds: ‘My curvy kitchen is warm and friendly. It does make people smile.’ Ah, the most important curve of all.

See the full article on page 19 of the April 2008 How to Spend It digital edition.

When recently asked about his use of curves, Johnny explained it as follows:

My use of curves was initiated from the way peripheral eye vision works. Corners stimulate one’s defence mechanism. Imagine a tunnel four feet wide with spiky rocks sticking out. All you will do is focus on preventing being hurt. If the same tunnel is lined with upholstery, you breeze down it thinking of the beautiful experience you will be having in bed or at the table tomorrow. When peripheral vision is activated, you use much more brain capacity because it is all about self defence and the hormones associated with flight and fight mechanisms – which will then be activated. Full frontal vision is so much part of our normal day to day experience that we effectively can focus on other tasks or experiences and the ‘nice’ emotions. Plus curves work satisfactorily with the body and eye from a symmetrical perspective.

We’ve just received excellent coverage in The Washington Post in Bonnie Benwick’s article, Tips for a Heavenly Jumble: Fewer Built-ins, More Mixed Pieces. She writes about how Johnny’s unfitted kitchen concept can be a smart option for kitchen renovation in tough economic times. She shares several of Johnny’s do’s and don’ts if you have the opportunity to alter the physical makeup of your kitchen. For storage, a mix-and-match style of separate pieces can create a more relaxed room. Similarly, smaller, dedicated work areas are often preferable to large work surfaces as too much footage creates unnecessarily long distances and low-key confusion. Johnny also recommends changes such as varying surface heights. Read the full article for the rest of Johnny’s tips.