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.

John Naish’s article, “What makes a house a home?” in the October issue of Psychologies Magazine begins with the proclamation: ‘You and I are never going to get on’. He was referring to a grand Victorian trophy house that he bought to fulfil what turned out to be a misconceived fantasy.

Naish then swapped his Victorian nightmare for an odd shaped, ramshackle but loveable London terrace house. In so doing, he learnt that aspiration and comfort are very different creatures indeed. Comfort is complex, hard to achieve and at the very top of the list of human needs.

Naish seeks out research from social scientists and writers to find out what it is that makes a house a home. At the beginning, he quotes neuro-scientist John Zeisel: ‘our genetically developed instincts make us feel relaxed around flowers, hearth and water’. Edward Wilson, professor of comparative zoology at Harvard, expands upon this statement by explaining biophilia, which is our need for organic surroundings.

Studies by Frances Kuo at Illinois University also found that women residing in apartments are less depressed when they have views of nature, while novelist Douglas Coupland is quoted about de-narration and the damage caused by banishing all references to personal clutter.

Frank McAndrew, an environmental psychologist at Knox College, Illinois says we prefer rooms with nooks and we like to survey our spaces from a safe vantage point so we don’t feel exposed. Meanwhile, author and professor Clare Cooper Marcus from Berkeley in her book House as Mirror of Self advises us to ‘ask the house to talk’ if you feel lost in what to do.

The quest for psychologically and physically comfortable homes is what we at JG studios have been striving at for years. We have updated our concept of the unfitted kitchen with the sympathetic application of neuroscience in our spatial analysis. We get a mention at the end of John’s piece as purveyors of Sofa Geography. Pick up the latest issue of Psychologies to more to find out what that is!