Fairy tales and children’s stories, remote though they seem for professionals offering advice or householders seeking practical improvement to their homes, are great source material. Often being stuck in the humdrum of our everyday lives, we need renewal. As a kitchen designer, I am often faced with the challenge of unblocking my clients and discouraging them from rigidly copying pictures they see in magazines, So is it possible to get real, practical ideas from what appear to be absurd fantasies? Transposing ideas is tremendously fun and challenging. And ethereal is good, as keeping the imagination loose brings flexibility to thinking.

Where better to start than with Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows or the Secret Garden? Imagine a house with a hidden, metal studded front door hidden in the bushes. We recently created just such a passageway for a client on the coast near Chichester, England. Although it doesn’t involve a magical kingdom, the key idea was building an extension that hides behind an old garden wall. Literal translation of ideas is one approach but another is capturing of atmospheres and events, similar to the way scenes from films capture an emotion or experience we identify with.

There are plentiful examples where imaginary scenes can be translated into reality. Who has not thought of Aladdin’s cave when design a snug, cosy media room or Rapunzel’s tower or Treasure Island’s tree house when creating a bedroom? Robert Adam wanted to be an artist before becoming an architect and was inspired by Gothic fantasies, old ruins, imaginary places and tales of old Italian buildings. Places, studying buildings from history and previous lifetimes where children’s stories are often set are default starting points.

Rarely are children’s stories set in the present. The imagination seems to work better in the past although science fiction would argue for the future. An example of such a children’s story is Louis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which is full of extreme spatial experiences such as Alice shrinking and falling fast through the rabbit’s hole, landing in a hallway with seemingly unending locked doors. She is puzzled, thwarted and confused. Ever had this experience with entering buildings? Carroll’s humour and his surrealist creation bring such pleasure. To escape is a great release; to dream and not quite understand is in some ways like visiting Venice, Machu Picchu or Gaudi’s Parc Guell.

One of the most memorable scenes in the book is the Mad Hatter’s Tea party, with the long table, white cloth, orderly cups and saucers offset by egotistical, high impact companions with extreme clothes. Everyone is chattering but no one is engaging in real conversation. No room, cries the March Hare, Mad Hatter and Doormouse There’s plenty, retorts Alice as she takes a seat. Alice quickly retreats from the madness and re-enters the wood.

After a consultation with the Caterpillar, she soon comes upon a house where the Duchess is feeding a baby. As our heroine enters the kitchen, the cook takes the cauldron of soup off the fire and then showers Alice with saucepans, plates and dishes. Taking no notice of the flying debris, the Queen announces her famous command, ‘Off with her head!’.

Tenniel’s illustration of this scene is dominated by the Queen’s oversized head, but you can see the vestiges of a kitchen around them. I speculate what kind of kitchen Lewis Carroll’s and his illustrator would have made for Alice. Witty chaos maybe, unpredictable meals made of strange Marinetti-like ingredients, a lot of talking, including speculation about the world’s geometry, and strange Harry Potter-like magic going on in the background. Plates flying through the air, magic carpets, talking chandeliers, clocks that run backwards and anthropomorphic animals gathered around the table.

Throughout Carroll’s story, the accelerated speed of events and unexpected changes of scale provide challenging experiences of space. Fast moving conversations and a variety of perching places remind me of the joys of large families and big rooms. The open fire and the cat curled up on the floor suggest a sort of normality.

If anyone reading this wants to sketch their imaginary Alice in Wonderland kitchen, I will post it here. Meanwhile I have booked my tickets for the Portsmouth premiere of Tim Burton’s cinematic interpretation of Carroll’s tale. I can’t wait to see how Burton and his creative team have imagined the interiors, although in some ways I would like to keep my unformed and innocent imaginings. Carroll’s writing, although energetic and full of colour and content, left an openness to the imagination that makes room for all of us.

If you take away the dominance of food, what comes next? If cooking was the purpose of the 19th and early 20th century kitchen, what activities will take us into this century’s kitchen space?

As back rooms that were places of work for women, where the unremitting daily tasks of caring and providing were carried out, kitchens were not places of fun or leisure, but were rather more of duty and purpose. As household tasks are now increasingly shared between both genders, the contemporary kitchen has become a place where we can mix our domestic activities with enjoyable ones such as chatting, snacking or reading the newspaper.

In these happier kitchen times, our spaces are tailored to suit our instinctive needs – space, light, communication and nature. The kitchen is now a liberated space. So what’s next? What behaviours will influence how kitchen designers create  the kitchen of the future? To predict or anticipate this we need to look at how we live in and utilise the whole house.

Rooms have broken down their ‘use’ barriers, essentially become more multipurpose and open plan. Their conventional labels don’t necessarily apply anymore. Technology (and I say this with care because I have always been a bit of a sceptic regarding claims that it changes us as people) is playing a big role.

The proliferation of iPods, 3G phones and laptops democratically spreads the use of technology to allow it everywhere in the house. Every room can now be a media room, work room, game room or reading room, although not a kitchen! The cellular structure of the house is disintegrating and the kitchen is not just not exempt, but at the forefront.

Over the last few decades, the kitchen has been the most active room in the house in terms of evolutionary use. Dining rooms fell under the remit of the kitchen twenty years ago, being relocated to the front of the house. The various functions of the living room have also accrued over a similar time frame and now hallways, gardens and multimedia are in the orbit of the kitchen.

Five socio-economic forces that might account for these changes include: shortage of time because both men and women work: women’s liberation (if you are in doubt of this look at kitchens in Asia or the Middle East); open plan living with its addiction to light space; less formal social attitudes and behaviours; the widespread adoption of central heating; and changed attitudes about food and cooking.

Stay tuned for more on the evolution of the post-culinary kitchen.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson announced this summer that as of 2011, all publicly-funded homes built in the British capital will be 10 percent larger than the Parker Morris standards originally laid out in 1961 and adopted in 1967. As post-war minimum sizes for apartments and new houses, they have been increasingly ignored by developers who now offer even smaller spaces than those of pre-war houses. We went from rabbit hutches to shoe boxes in three generations.

No longer. Boris is a hero for highlighting that space is essential to human dignity. Even though we are in a period of financial restraint, he has taken a stand for quality and basic standards, recognising that house walls last for not just a generation, but more like a century or even longer when constructed well.

These Parker Morris standards are not hugely generous, so how can we get the most out of them, now that our lifestyles are less formal and more amenable to open-plan spaces? As kitchens are no longer separate, back rooms but rather the hub of family life, we have been presented with a unique opportunity for spatial liberation.

The Unfitted Kitchen reduces the visual definition of the kitchen, as its esprit-de-cours is that of a living room. It uses free standing, non-generic, non-matching furniture and architectural fittings, in a relaxed, but ergonomic way and fits easily into many room types. This enables even small apartments to be opened up, dwellers to escape the oppressiveness of small rooms, bringing an air of civility to how one lives in them.

Dwellers can enjoy the sociability of family living through having at least one space that is big enough for multiple activities. The sense of ease associated with open plan layouts, mostly found in larger homes, could become available to all. How ironic that its takes a politician to do something that no architect or designer could have done that nonetheless is so integral to the quality of future, urban home design. Now it is up to us designers to ensure that the public get more dignified homes as and when they are built.