See Designing a healthy kitchen: Part 2 - Cooking & Furniture and Designing a healthy kitchen: Part 1 - the Table for more on this topic.

• Review the architectural layout of your house. Bring the kitchen-living room to its centre if you can. Room uses can be swapped. The biggest room on the ground floor is ideal as many of the living functions have been added to the kitchen. Choose one next to the garden, with French doors if possible, as this hugely increases its user friendliness.
• People tend to be happiest between 7-10 pm, according to surveys outlined by Richard Layard in his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Not coincidentally, this is the time the kitchen is most likely to be occupied. It’s an opportune time when human communication is hard wired, after work and before bed. If the kitchen environment is well designed, we can take advantage of this. As it is now a multipurpose space, we expand our natural sociability by installing a hearth, a second table for doing homework, or a perching point for chatting whilst doing a variety of kitchen tasks.
• The visual ‘ownership’ of the terrace or veranda immediately adjacent to the kitchen belongs to the kitchen but it needs to be designed so that it is highly functional and natural, almost wild in terms of plants, trees and shrubs. Space to eat at a table needs to be complimented by an area for chilling out with bean bags, and floor level living. A portable low level fireplace works wonders in the evening for sitting round, echoing a campfire experience. This is so rewarding and easily done by using an old drain cover raised off the deck.
• The design and décor can make the room feel like a comfortable and welcoming space, more akin to a living room than just a cooking zone. Food encourages us to cook, clean up and linger. A group of Harvard economists have created an economic theory that the rise in weight of Americans is inversely related to the time it takes to prep, cook, clean up, lay the table, etc. The more technology reduces food costs*, the more we eat and the less we feel bothered to cook and the more we snack. Reverse this and you have a virtuous, not vicious, circle.

* David M Cutler et al. “Why have Americans become more obese.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol 17 No 3 (Summer 2003). pp 93-118.

See Designing a healthy kitchen: Part 1 - the Table and Designing a healthy kitchen: Part 3 - the Whole House for more on this topic.

• Include a multi-level central island or soft-edged peninsula to make the act of cooking a sociable, pleasurable experience. Cooking and prepping should occur facing into the room. Designing ergonomic but user-friendly furniture puts the cooking at the centre of the room and helps the cook feel in control. He or she is like the conductor of an orchestra, bringing harmony to the process along with effective delivery of the food. Cooking facing towards the wall is no-no
• Include a plating surface near the cooktop that can double as a food bar. In this way, you can catch those meals that might have ended up as snacks or one-person events. Today’s busy families have to accommodate an array of diets and activities. But the most important thing is not what you eat, but eating together, even if standing up. By serving tapas, mezze style, everyone can find something they like and still eat together, serve themselves with others looking on so that portions taken are reasonable and then take their plate to the table. Not enough kitchens have these serving bars. Ideally, they should be accessible from behind the range, and raised in height to separate them from the messier cooking surfaces.
• A sense of order is key to making cooking efficient. We have developed a concept called dedicated work surfaces that provides enough but not too much counter top space to do one task efficiently. These are positioned carefully so as to be adjacent to related tasks, but still leave enough space for sociable pieces of furniture like a sofa and hutch/dresser.
• Having a place to display family pictures and children’s pottery is a clear sign of hominess. Adding bowls of fruit is both visually delightful and offers children and adults a chance to assuage their mid-meal hunger with something healthy. It’s also a delightful place to show off home grown produce. No kitchen should be without one.

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.