Kitchen islands are a relatively recent invention.  They first appeared in 1950s USA as a way of filling up newly expanded kitchen spaces.  The introduction of breakfast bars, probably inspired by neighbourhood diners, turned what was a cross between a range and a working table into a multi-function piece of furniture that is the star of the kitchen.  Cooking counters in diners proved the value of eating near a cooking zone as pre-served plates could be handed across the worktop for instant consumption. This allowed the island socialize the domestic kitchen by bringing eating into the heart of the culinary area. The arrival of efficient air ventilation systems on the market conveniently coincided making it possible to take the cooking hobs away from the chimney breast.

Ergonomics was the next development.  Following Henry Ford’s application of productivity theory, kitchen design eventually benefited from time and motion studies.  Surprisingly few serious attempts had been made to apply ergonomics to the kitchen by the time I started designing central Islands, and few acknowledged the social role of the kitchen.

Cindy’s diner, restored to it’s 1954 original, Kansas City.

Image courtesy of Kansas Historical Foundation

PERSONAL DISCOVERIES

My understanding of the role the island plays in lifting kitchen design to an art includes two other constituents. The Alexander Technique, a movement therapy taught in drama and music schools is based on a system of moving with a sense of economy to support the back and the body’s posture.  This led me to a concept I call ‘dedicated work surfaces’ where a culinary activity is optimized through calculating the space required to accommodate it without being overly generous, with the appropriate counter height and surface material then selected.  A balance needs to found, giving the hands space to work without involving unnecessary foot movement.  Too much space given to one kitchen activity reduces the room available for another.
My second discovery was the importance of peripheral vision. Our eyes cause our bodies to react to sharp edges and corners by becoming defensive, an alert signal going off in the brain sending low level flight and fight response signals.  I developed ‘soft geometry’, curved shapes which form natural routes between furniture and architectural features to make islands easy to negotiate, essential as islands are by their nature in the middle of a room.

NO MAN CAN LIVE ON AN ISLAND

Islands don’t exist on their own.  In a kitchen interior, arrangements need to be made between the central island and the doors, windows, walls, fridges, cupboards and tables.  The first thing to do is establish the ‘sweet spot’ or ‘driving position’, the safest and most strategic position for the cook.  Once that is located, with space left behind to protect the cook’s back (a well-established psychological need), one can assess the amount of space in front for an island, ideally with room behind for a sink cabinet.  Storage, best located in the zone between eyes and knees, is the third phase of the design.

Kitchen Island designed for clients in Memphis 2000

ALLOCATION OF WORK SPACE

The placement of prepping takes priority and is generally best sited on a corner to allow for a two-directional approach.  The cooktop should be kept in the centre, with a back-up work surface either to the right or in front. This can be a lower level surface at table height for use by children or as a pastry roll out area.  The longest work surface is the breakfast bar, we rename more accurately the food bar.  It’s for eating, serving and all purpose food display set highest of all so that it can’t be used as a prep surface.  Its users can then see what’s going on whether they sit on bar stools or perch and no one gets their hair singed as they are above the level of hot pans on the stove!

DESIGN MANNERS

Varying the mass of the island into a sequence of connected shapes creates sculptural harmony.  Some parts might even be see-through so that light can travel across the floor, from windows to the corridor to between the island and wall counters.  Installing a lighting gantry that echoes the outline shape of the island helps prevent it looking isolated or like an overgrown table. Include bars or hooks for small tools as this allows the cook sight and reach of his/her tools.  Lights enhance the rack’s function and visual appeal.  Finally, make sure the scale is right.  Small furniture in big rooms looks lost, big islands in small rooms mean you create an obstacle like something from Maurice Sendak’s Scary Monsters… After that it’s all up to the cook.

* More text on central islands can be found in a section at the back of my book Kitchen Culture

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.

It appears Darwin can shed light, or rather add fuel to the fire, to the debate about why kitchens are important, how they have helped humans jump up the evolutionary scale and explain why they are spaces on the ascendance, even though people cook less.

In this book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human, Richard Wrangman explains how cooking has made us more intelligent and sociable in evolutionary terms; cooking helps us have better sex, promotes (useful) division of labour and contributes to the concept of well-organised, domestic households.

His theory starts off with how fire shifted our diet from raw food (bad for us, not good, as recent fads suggest) to cooked food. Horses and cows, for example, need to keep eating constantly and have no time for leisure. Even hunter-gatherers were tied to a cycle of hunting and starvation, which was time consuming and distracting, and occasionally fatal. Agricultural man could not digest uncooked grains and most fresh fruits don’t store, so we would not have developed diverse diet or progressed beyond primitive lifestyles without cooking.

Cooked food requires less energy to digest and leaves us with time to pursue mental activities like education and craft skills. With a more efficient digestive system, our brains were able to grow bigger and needed less bulky organs to support a large brain size.

The increasing ratio of brain size to body is explained by more effective cooking. The first sharp increase of brain size was due to shifting our diets from foliage to roots – which have more carbohydrates – around 5 – 7 million years ago. The second brain expansion, around 1.8 to I million years ago, was due to eating more meet, which was only possible due to more effective digestion.

The food quest is key to our evolutionary success, although ironically this is now in doubt. There is the prospect of our kids living shorter lives due to our perversion of the food supply industry (see my blog post on Michael Pollen’s book Food Rules: In Defence of Food), the lack of physical work and disregard for sociability.

To end on a positive note, in defence of kitchens, Wrangham says that cooking softens food, which enables us to eat more efficiently, hence allowing us to spend more time working at tasks not related to survival. It also supports a division of labour that creates a well-balanced household economy whereby the hunter-gatherer women were treated well, because they were needed by men to ensure functioning of the dietary system. We believe that modern man has been reconstructed, but it is clear that having a sociable place to cook and eat is a key to remaining healthy. Fast food restaurants tend to use overly rich ingredients and don’t provide you with a diet for longevity. Cooking at home, on the other hand, does and it is tailored to your own specification.

Open-plan, sociable kitchens provide support for digestion as eating is slowed down by conversation. A calm environment, with long views for instinctive relaxation and other rituals so elegantly set out by Margeret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner, discourage over-eating. Wrangham claims we learned many of the elements of sociable behaviour through the discovery of fire and developing an ability to cook. The circular argument seems complete: the more you cook, the more civilized you become. Maybe the modern kitchen is not so much the living room in which you cook, but where you become socialised or join civilisation?