I think we all know she was a cook – or it’s very easy to find this out.  I would like to remember some other things about my aunt.

She could not bear being told what to do.  I’m not sure what led to this, but while still in her teens she ran away from home.  She was fed up with family life, such as it was at Wootton Manor in Sussex, and she had plans to become an actress.  The Oxford Playhouse proved a temporary stop, as she and one of its company, Charles Gibson Gowen, escaped to sea in a barge.  They kept one step ahead of the Germans as war broke out until arrested in Venice and subsequently freed by the American ambassador.  She embraced the chaos of the war, working for much of it at the British Army intelligence library in Cairo.  Afterwards, she wrote cookery books, apparently to prove her worth to another (married) lover.

I first knew my aunt properly when she was recovering from a stroke and had lost her sense of taste. What to do?  My father was her doctor and he suggested, along with others, that she open a shop.  She liked this challenge.  It turned out she had been collecting addresses of potteries, cast-iron foundries, chinaware companies, artisan knife makers and tin ware manufacturers during her repeated trips to France. Her favourite shops were ironmongers, ideally French, where the British bought their cookery ware as no cookshops existed then.  From one trip she bought back a collection of cast brass cup hooks and asked me if I could get them made here as there was no English equivalent.  That was my job, fixing things.  As her nephew my duties included changing light bulbs, building bookshelves and sink cabinets and gassing cupboards for woodworm in her Chelsea terrace.

A bus journey to 44 Bourne St Pimlico found me facing an industrial sized plate glass window in an ugly, modern, narrow shop front. A table placed across the entire width to display basic French tin ware, piled high, looked like nothing I had seen before.  Inside were pots set on garage shelves with straw strewn about and bread crocks on the floor and a staircase leading to a concrete basement.  Visiting the shop was my top priority when escaping boarding school for the holidays.  Liza (as we called her) most often hid in the stockroom (people constantly wanted her advice and she found it exhausting) on a bar stool, knees to one side at an old pine dresser.  This doubled up as desk, samples spot, notice board and waiting-to-be-filed zone.  She dressed in black and white, with black, thick-rimmed glasses. I was always welcome and was offered Nescafe in small white porcelain coffee cups.  The place smelled of disque bleu cigarettes, fresh ones and stale.

Customers and friends from all over the world brought trade samples and seasonal food.  I remember figs, persimmons, walnuts and cheeses.  In the basement the objects took on glamour.  She styled things in her shop in a casual but eye-catching and unusual way, the lighting borrowed from a photographer’s studio.  Stock moved so fast when it first opened that everything was sold within a month. Other retailers quickly caught on, even Terence Conran admitted her influence on Habitat in later years. Independent cookshops sprung up in high streets in USA, Australia and here.

Her own kitchen was full of exotic clutter, freestanding furniture, piles of books and strange cooking equipment.  No units and long countertops for her - just a decent table, a stove and some good few dressers and a capacious old cupboard.  I loved visiting just to hang about in that kitchen.

My aunt’s spirit is captured in Artemis Coopers’ excellent biography, Writing at the Kitchen Table.  She excelled in writing, conversation and enjoyment of being in a kitchen.  One last rebellion – her mother had banned Elizabeth and her sisters from ever going into her kitchen at Wootton to prevent them getting in the cook’s way, but she ended up by practically living in one: I installed a stylish cane day bed in her final ‘winter kitchen’.

‘Enchantment’ is a slightly quaint word to use in connection with kitchen design. When recently judging the Kitchen Bedroom and Bathroom  (KBB) Design Awards, it nevertheless came into my mind as the missing ingredient in many of the entries, despite a number of good ones. What they lacked was a sense of the personal, beyond linear cabinetry, black and stainless appliances, commonplace handles and hard stone counters.  These kitchens needed warming up with elements of charm, creativity from artisanship or signs of use. I realise this is particularly difficult in new build properties but many developers acknowledge this by employing specialists for show houses.

Grandma’s kitchen, styled by Reminisce Magazine

Is charm capturable, and can it be planned for?  Thomas Moore, writer and psychotherapist, notes a ‘close tie between enchantment and haunting’, i.e. the continued presence of the past (people and memories) people and memories) in our lives.  When you come across personal elements or signs of private life in a design scheme these qualities create a tangible atmosphere.  By means of a painting, a poem, music, a view of landscape or garden, a piece of furniture or a room of unusual character in someone’s house, momentary loss of awareness of time can be experienced is created along with a welcome feeling of being transported.

Art is a particularly easy way of adding delight whether in the form of pattern on the furniture, in ceramic surfaces or hung on the wall, likewise seeing furniture as a medium to express more than function.

A desk isn’t just a place to put papers….

Let me offer a few insights.  First, create a physical and psychic space with opened-up planning and less furniture per square metre. Natural light, a table or island positioned in an arc of sunlight, a long view and places to sit, lean or perch, all help encourage lingering and a sense of belonging.  A couple of corners of the room could be left free, letting the architecture breathe.

A recent project in Cyprus

Then invite time and memory in, invoking different decades or even centuries via things collected.  All objects, not just heirlooms, tell a story: the salad bowl bought on holiday or a junk shop chair.  Cookery utensils, especially if received as a gift, acquire aesthetic and emotional significance, and so does anything commissioned from a crafts person.  Just as in a good novel the writer leaves interpretive space for the reader’s imagination, the relationship between designer and client is a creative collaboration.  By including personally meaningful objects and playful ideas an environment is created that has a life of its own, the space inhabited by multiple presences and temporalities.

Classic LA kitchen

Rather than something to be resisted as sentimental, nostalgia can play a vital role in our lives*, it warms the hands as well as the heart, says the psychologist Tim Wildschut of Southampton University. More recently in the Guardian ** he described it as a mood booster. Chicago psychologist Fred Bryant was quoted in the same article (by Stuart Jeffries 15th January) as equating reminiscence with the sense of being ‘rooted in a better past’. Morris Berman the cultural historian who wrote Re-enchantment of the World back in 1981 said recalling pre-scientific revolution consciousness would re-kindle our connection to the environment and animistic natures.  Making people’s homes feel like a nest in line with our instincts is part of this, so is holistic kitchen design.  It is worth noting too that allowing for nostalgia does not exclude modern aesthetics, as the present moment always incorporates elements from the past – a defining characteristic of the contemporary is this mixing of periods.  ‘Mid (20th) Century Modern’ is now a recognised design movement that produces its own pleasurable nostalgia and has given ‘retro’ a potent and recognisable content to use in kitchen interiors.

All this explains why when I visit people’s homes and leaf through interior design magazines the kitchens tend to leave me rather cold, or un-enchanted.   Other rooms – sitting rooms, dining rooms, studies,hallways, conservatories, even the outside rooms of gardens – succeed better, as they tend to allow for more self-expression.  We kitchen-makers should learn from these diverse spaces.

Vino Buenco Private house, B & B and cookery school in Andalucia - one of my favourite outdoor dining spaces designed by Sam and Jeannie Chesterton.

*see The Telegraph 17th January http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9718896/Nostalgia-warms-the-hands-as-well-as-the-heart.html

** The Guardian,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/15/hmv-death-british-high-street?INTCMP=SRCH

http://bryant.socialpsychology.org/

http://www.fincabuenvino.com/

Messy kitchens, happy living?  I think so.  The first time I go into a house the sight of the kitchen reveals much about the owner’s world view.  Exaggerated tidiness can mean little cooking,  too much time spent cleaning or simply not much use of the space, with coffee-making hidden behind cupboard doors.  Kitchens wear many hats these days, the most attractive to me being like workshops for living instead of woodwork or metal-bashing.  Here the whole family can perform their lives pleasurably, with the kitchen as one of the remaining zones of creativity in our homes along with teenage bedrooms or the outside shed, except that it is also a scene of communal activity.  Neatness exacts a price and takes up too much time ,especially when young children are involved.  Adults too need to find the child in themselves and escape from bossy notions of perfection.

In A Perfect Mess, Eric Abrahamson reveals the hidden benefits of disorder, and The Comfort of Things by anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that personal clutter makes lives happier, with people who enjoy their objects also caring better for each other.  Should we not be designing kitchens with these behavioural requirements in mind?  I often wonder why magazine features always show them spotless, bereft looking?  Maybe kitchens should be appreciated not when they are tidy but when in use, even all messed up?

I find myself missing mess in the kitchen.  Our three older children are away at university or abroad and although the youngest, an enthusiastic cook, makes up for it, he is away at school for long hours.  When Tim Dowling described his boys’ nighttime cooking in last week’s Guardian Weekend I felt a surprising amount of nostalgia!  He says, ‘Downstairs I find the archaeological remains of some kind of ransacking: the contents of the refrigerator seem to have exploded across the kitchen. But I also discover evidence of a primitive form of cooperation: an attempt has been made to empty the dishwasher, and also to make brownies. Both, sadly, have failed’.

For years Becca and I cooked while the kids played, waited, watched, but now it’s sometimes the other way round with us awaiting their cooking, or we all do it together. Either way, flour lands on the floor, vegetables mix on the chopping block, four pans bubble away at different speeds, oven and dishwasher fans whirring to music from a democratically-decided queue of iPod tracks.  This is when I love the kitchen most.

A kitchen that accommodates mess would get my vote in a design competition, not a minimalistic, glossy, stainless steel package.  The winning design would include colour, texture, furniture from more than one source, signs of occupation with un-matching chairs, open shelves with displays of accumulated objects from visits to junk shops - as well as some highly functional furniture to support the cooks.  It is better, surely, to think of kitchens as busy hardworking spaces rather than status symbols.

I posted the above a few weeks back but since then have discovered there is a growing movement, Philosophers of Mess, you might call them. The New York Times ran a story, Saying Yes to Mess

Illustration Penelope Green NYT

Stop feeling bad, say the mess apologists. There are more urgent things to worry about. Irwin Kula is a rabbi based in Manhattan and author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life,” which was published by Hyperion in September. “Order can be profane and life-diminishing,” he said the other day. “It’s a flippant remark, but if you’ve never had a messy kitchen, you’ve probably never had a home-cooked meal. Real life is very messy, but we need to have models about how that messiness works.”  I am off to buy the book. It’s a justification for not clearing up all those Christmas meals to get back to the table, the fire or the telly. Our family Christmas just got a whole lot more relaxed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/garden/21mess.html?pagewanted=all