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!

This title by Nancy Hiller is must read for anyone interested in American kitchens. It works on several levels. There is the story of the kitchen coming out of the closet of domestic slavery into the modern world of sociability and prestige ownership, an example of what happens when capitalism is applied to a domestic room, and the tale of the twentieth-century kitchen seen through the eyes of marketing and advertising, with its media messages and imagery. Finally my favourite – it identifies the precursors of the unfitted kitchen or the joint use of design and furniture-making to create a domestic room that can be comfortable, accommodating and effective.

Nancy Hiller is a rare beast of a cabinet maker, scholar and writer. She uses the Hoosier cabinet as a lens for social history. As a multi-purpose piece of furniture that claimed it could enable you to do almost everything you ever need to in a kitchen without moving a step, even saving up to 1592 steps in one day. Depending on what year you were in or what marketing message was being promoted, it might help the housewife to ‘stay young’, ‘abolish (household) slavery’ or be the best gift a father could give to his daughter to teach her how to cook. Its local setting is Indiana, where they had manufactured over a million cabinets and created hundreds of jobs by 1916. But its really a story of early twentieth-century America and the drive for efficient production, provision of mass furnishing, expectations of  consumer comfort alongside the gradual commercialisation of the kitchen industry. 

By 1933, the Hoosier cabinet was considered old fashioned and its decline was inevitable. Its legacy is both charming and valuable: antique hunters chase down  Hoosier cabinets as desirable gems for their contemporary kitchens, but best of all they remain an iconic reminder that there is an alternative to continuous counters, the American name for the ubiquitous fitted kitchens that most people have had to put up with in Britain and Europe. That is the price you pay for allowing commerce to run or rule the industry rather than designers and householders - in other words, human beings with emotional needs and a desire for comfort.

The Hoosier Cabinet in kitchen history. Nancy R Hiller. Indiana University Press 
ISNB 978-0-253-31424-6