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.

When I was driving my aunt Elizabeth David around Wales in pursuit of her research into historic ovens for her bread book in the early 1970s, I did not appreciate her obsessive interest in how ovens worked. Now I understand, at least in relation to cob ovens. These ovens miraculously transform the flavour and texture of bread, pizza and roasted vegetables. Radiant heat given off by the clay walls cooks food quite differently from the network of heat-producing electric elements in the metal boxes that are modern ovens.

The process of making them was the other transformative aspect of the cob oven course we sponsored at West Lexham in eastern England last weekend. It was held at the Norfolk country house of landscape gardener Edmund Colville, who offers educational courses in a beautiful setting. Our family spent an extraordinary weekend of learning how to build a bread oven made out of cob from scratch. This was an experience of making, involving head (in the planning), hands and feet (treading and kneading the clay and sand into cob) and stomach (on the receiving end of the first baking) – as well as the great pleasure of working together on a common project.

There was so much to discover. Dan Britton, an expert of building cob ovens at festivals like Glastonbury was course leader, who along with Viv Goodings, builder and nature lore expert, guided us through the process with quiet expertise and created a sense of shared exploration. On the second day, resident baker Simon Blackwell showed us how to make sourdough bread.

Pictures tell the story best.  My brother Steve and eldest son Harry sparked off inventive ideas like building in a recycled radiator for the extra bonus of free hot water once the oven is lit. My wife Becca and the others joined in and discovered new interests in, for example, making pottery.

My family and I are now in a rush to build a cob oven at home and also to persuade our clients, at least all those with garden terraces, to do the same. A feature like this is a perfect focus for an active, outdoor kitchen.  Add a few outdoor beanbags and you can settle down for a long evening in your new living space with the sky as a roof and not a TV in sight.

What happens to kitchen design when the grip of conventional cabinetry is loosened? Johnny Grey Studios designed a garden kitchen that was on display at the end of May during the Chelsea Flower Show.

The concept behind this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, held at the Royal Hospital in London, was ‘increasing people’s connection with their gardens’. I exhibited with Alitex, the classy conservatory and greenhouse makers who commissioned our garden kitchen. JGS designer Leila Ferraby and I used materials that would withstand outdoor temperatures and moisture levels: stainless steel, granite, solid maple, coconut palm and ceramic tiles.

Inside rooms are often out of sync with the best garden views and key windows don’t always offer chances to view favourite scenes or plants. Kitchens and living rooms, not surprisingly, are designed with interior priorities such as maximizing size, circulation, or, traditionally, making a fireplace work.  According to research, the average British person spends 80% of their time inside, while the evolutionary expectation of our bodies is the reverse.  In our search for well-being it makes sense to rediscover living habits that allow us to be outside for longer. Hence my relatively new ambition to take the kitchen outdoors as far as possible.

As our stand was on the main avenue I had a lot of time to contemplate the show gardens. They had in common a desire to create a sanctuary, a place to escape the world and renew ourselves. Our hard wired need for nature aside, it has taken me a while to work this out as a key motivation for gardening, going beyond the beauty of plants and the alluring verdancy of nature’s offerings to a fulfilling and sustaining pathway to contentment. All the show gardens had outdoor covered space to increase opportunities to feel close to plants.

Professor Nigel Dunnett gets my prize for his garden for the Royal Bank of Canada. Inspired by William Robinson, the father of wild gardening movement from the nineteenth century. His garden had a foreground of wild flowers laid out in front of a shipping container, which was adapted into a garden room, its roof covered by plants. Nearby was a seating circle surrounded by birches, with woodland ground planting. Circular pools were fed by sustainable capture and re-use of water, and insects supported by his ‘bug hotel’ in the dry stone walls. From within the container, everything works to cocoon you in a beautiful garden that is both wild and contemporary.

Tom Hobbin’s Cornish Memories Garden was a linear design stemming from a modern pergola at one end. Wooden oval columns and curved, machined roof timbers supported an oval sheet-glass roof surrounded by dogwoods, rhododendrons and virburnum. Elegant water rills offering gentle background music for contemplation led into a natural swimming pool, which is based on coastal rock pools and planted with oxygenators to look like seaweed.

Luciano Giubbilei, an old friend I have worked with in the past, created magical planting in his garden for Laurent Perrier.

I could sit for hours and watch the light changing as it percolates through the canopies of the Persian ironwood trees, throwing shadows over the Peter Randall Page sculpted boulders. Bringing order to nature, one of Luciano’s themes, is one that they share together. On the BBC Luciano says ‘you can create the same atmosphere at a table as you can do in a garden’ - if he had not been a garden designer he would apparently have been a chef.

None of the Chelsea designs specifically develop my idea that it is possible to be outdoors for more of our lives, if we do what we do inside outside – cooking, eating, sitting before or after the meal (although I suspect this needs a fireplace). Provided with the right kind of outdoor space, we could be watching the garden and the sky instead of the television.