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?

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!