Nancy’s delightful, brave and original book, A Home of Her Own, shows what comes about when women build their own homes. It breaks from the classic interior design format, so it has the missing bits included – mini-biographies of the individuals who have built against the odds, as well as indoor and outside photos. You get the whole picture, not just smart, primed-up, perfectly decorated interiors.

A very personal account of Nancy’s emotional relationship with the first American house she bought herself (she lived in Reading, UK when she was younger) and her longing for it, provides a moving account and an insight into the wider aspects of what the process gave her. As she is both a cabinet-maker and an academic, renovating the house gave her mental relief during a difficult time.  It backs up the claims of Sherry Tuckle, sociologist and author of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, that objects naturally become emotional companions that anchor memory, inspire meditation, demand time and commitment, and foster total connectedness to place by encouraging the development of skills.

When you make stuff yourself, build your own roof and walls yourself, the emotional quotient doubles. I recently re-built a workshop in the woods with my son Felix, and my brother (sadly, not my daughter). It’s small, basic and of simple construction but every time I go into it I feel a ridiculous amount of pleasure.

In my opinion, a country where you can build a home of your own is a place where democracy thrives and the living must be good. If women can do it on their own, why don’t we have more women builders, craftsman, particularly cabinet makers?

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.

Kitchen making begins by placing the table in front of a window with the best view. Sanity begins when you sit down to eat. The world with all its distractions and bad news is suddenly at bay, sidelined, on hold. A sense of relief gives way to the prospect of sociability, warm words (you can hope for with reason although it does not always work out) and tasteful pleasures. The table represents the aura of family and customs of civilization, whatever the culture or ethnic tribe you belong to Even if it’s a small table – and in some ways this is more intimate, no kitchen should be without one. It might even be worth thinking about two smaller tables – one is often in use as a non-food shuffle of books, papers, laptops and objects of daily life, like a clearing station for in transit. Having two tables saves clearing up every time you want to eat. For our own home I would rather sacrifice countertop space and make sure we were properly tabled-up. I try to persuade clients of this, though not usually successfully!

Raising the status and respect for the table and what it represents to the household and the value of eating together, whether once a day or regularly during the week, gets my vote.

John lives 15 miles from me near Chicester, with a studio at the centre of Denmans Garden, one of his own creations that is also open to the public. He has now published 24 books. It all started with Room Outside (1969), which has just been republished. Despite being over 40 years old, it’s the best book on the market about the using garden space to really live in. We can use our outdoors more fully if the integration of house and garden is planned well. The space surrounding a building (known as a “transition zone”) - whether terrace, courtyard, patio or veranda - is often seen as a buffer zone for circulation, kept free of trees to avoid the mess of leaf fall, branch damage and disturbance to foundations or simply out of fear of damaging wall surfaces. Buildings, especially houses, need the softening impact of nature or they can look forbidding, with hard edifices that make too much impact for domestic comfort.

Inevitably, in North America and warmer climates the transition zone is more effectively used for outdoor living. In the UK, we sometimes need to be reminded of our natural instincts to be outdoors and enjoy the efforts of our gardening labours. John points this out in this influential first book, explaining how to do this in an easy-to-access way with soft and hard surfacing, planting design, ground shaping and drainage, special features, garden furnishings. In short, he tells us how to make an outdoor room.

John has the look of someone who lives his own philosophy, rugged and weather-beaten due to a life spent outside As I discuss these things, I want to get out and be doing that now. Planting plants that we can see, smell, be near. Enjoying their scale, shape and experience their biological detail, not to mention the comparative colour, texture and shape. Standing back you realize that the assemblages we put together whilst making our gardens are truly awe-inspiring in their variety.

John recently judged the Slant Landscape Awards. The winners’ ideas, he told me, filled him with optimism. “River-Some” from South Korea and “Parque Del Delta” from Argentina. And a new online garden design school allows you to access John’s knowledge first hand.  For a modest sum you can download videos and learn garden design from the master - from the comfort of your kitchen table.

Remarkably, for one of the world’s richest individuals, Jobs lived in modest style. He and Laurene were in their mid-to-late thirties when we met but did not seem interested in setting themselves up with bourgeois comfort and display. Instead, despite having two children, they lived a bit like self-disciplined students: the first things you saw inside the front door were a plumbed-in washing machine and a dryer (temporarily located there during building modifications). This was in Palo Alto in what they called their cottage, which they preferred to the big house down the coast in Woodside. They liked to think of the cottage as English. It was vaguely Arts and Crafts in style, a relaxed-looking interior somewhat under-furnished with Persian rugs and freestanding pieces. Unmissable was their love of music with piles of CDs, records and guitars about the place, the only objects that might amount to clutter. Unlike a real English cottage the house was light and spacious.

I went on to design a kitchen, utility rooms and some furniture. The kitchen brief was to keep a modern Arts and Crafts look in mind, with plenty of space for prepping and a circular central island. A walk-in cool chamber was an innovative feature.  The Jobses were staunch vegetarians, Laurene having set up a vegan food business. The kitchen was where they lived, albeit inherited from a previous owner, and consisted of boring white units with tiled tops and wooden edges. Nevertheless, it was the setting for the kind hospitality they showed to me, most of it on a cramped table in the corner sitting on chairs with wobbly legs.

As members of the Whole Earth Catalogue generation, vegetable gardening and self-sufficiency were important to the Jobses. We talked about redesigning the garden to provide more privacy for the house. Steve’s love of gardens was not generally known. We discussed creating outdoor rooms with borders, wild flowers clustered together to ensure plenty of colour, with privacy from the street. I spent time helping him find an English gardener.

During the following three years I saw Steve and Laurene at their home when I visited to polish up the design. We once met in London at the Savoy hotel during one of his rushed, but highly publicised European trips. His comments, as you might expect knowing his track record at Apple, were brief and to the point, mostly in the direction of simplifying the design, staking out a more severe, monastic approach. Shaker simplicity was often his default position. I suspect he became more of a modernist in the late nineties.

He was a very private person and reluctant to have any building work done, powerfully disliking noise, mess and invasion of their home. Steve recommended that I open a showroom in San Francisco, and I duly did in 1999. He said Americans needed to employ more serious design skills in their kitchens. The Jobses still live in the same house today. I noticed fans were scrawling messages on the pavement in front in a news clip today

He re-enforced a myth I grew up with, that America was the future, and that its technology was going to lead the world to a better place. We will be poorer off without him.

RIP

The process of making them was the other transformative aspect of the cob oven course we sponsored at West Lexham in eastern England last weekend. It was held at the Norfolk country house of landscape gardener Edmund Colville, who offers educational courses in a beautiful setting. Our family spent an extraordinary weekend of learning how to build a bread oven made out of cob from scratch. This was an experience of making, involving head (in the planning), hands and feet (treading and kneading the clay and sand into cob) and stomach (on the receiving end of the first baking) – as well as the great pleasure of working together on a common project.

There was so much to discover. Dan Britton, an expert of building cob ovens at festivals like Glastonbury was course leader, who along with Viv Goodings, builder and nature lore expert, guided us through the process with quiet expertise and created a sense of shared exploration. On the second day, resident baker Simon Blackwell showed us how to make sourdough bread.

Pictures tell the story best.  My brother Steve and eldest son Harry sparked off inventive ideas like building in a recycled radiator for the extra bonus of free hot water once the oven is lit. My wife Becca and the others joined in and discovered new interests in, for example, making pottery.

My family and I are now in a rush to build a cob oven at home and also to persuade our clients, at least all those with garden terraces, to do the same. A feature like this is a perfect focus for an active, outdoor kitchen.  Add a few outdoor beanbags and you can settle down for a long evening in your new living space with the sky as a roof and not a TV in sight.

The concept behind this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, held at the Royal Hospital in London, was ‘increasing people’s connection with their gardens’. I exhibited with Alitex, the classy conservatory and greenhouse makers who commissioned our garden kitchen. JGS designer Leila Ferraby and I used materials that would withstand outdoor temperatures and moisture levels: stainless steel, granite, solid maple, coconut palm and ceramic tiles.

Inside rooms are often out of sync with the best garden views and key windows don’t always offer chances to view favourite scenes or plants. Kitchens and living rooms, not surprisingly, are designed with interior priorities such as maximizing size, circulation, or, traditionally, making a fireplace work.  According to research, the average British person spends 80% of their time inside, while the evolutionary expectation of our bodies is the reverse.  In our search for well-being it makes sense to rediscover living habits that allow us to be outside for longer. Hence my relatively new ambition to take the kitchen outdoors as far as possible.

As our stand was on the main avenue I had a lot of time to contemplate the show gardens. They had in common a desire to create a sanctuary, a place to escape the world and renew ourselves. Our hard wired need for nature aside, it has taken me a while to work this out as a key motivation for gardening, going beyond the beauty of plants and the alluring verdancy of nature’s offerings to a fulfilling and sustaining pathway to contentment. All the show gardens had outdoor covered space to increase opportunities to feel close to plants.

Professor Nigel Dunnett gets my prize for his garden for the Royal Bank of Canada. Inspired by William Robinson, the father of wild gardening movement from the nineteenth century. His garden had a foreground of wild flowers laid out in front of a shipping container, which was adapted into a garden room, its roof covered by plants. Nearby was a seating circle surrounded by birches, with woodland ground planting. Circular pools were fed by sustainable capture and re-use of water, and insects supported by his ‘bug hotel’ in the dry stone walls. From within the container, everything works to cocoon you in a beautiful garden that is both wild and contemporary.

Tom Hobbin’s Cornish Memories Garden was a linear design stemming from a modern pergola at one end. Wooden oval columns and curved, machined roof timbers supported an oval sheet-glass roof surrounded by dogwoods, rhododendrons and virburnum. Elegant water rills offering gentle background music for contemplation led into a natural swimming pool, which is based on coastal rock pools and planted with oxygenators to look like seaweed.

Luciano Giubbilei, an old friend I have worked with in the past, created magical planting in his garden for Laurent Perrier.

I could sit for hours and watch the light changing as it percolates through the canopies of the Persian ironwood trees, throwing shadows over the Peter Randall Page sculpted boulders. Bringing order to nature, one of Luciano’s themes, is one that they share together. On the BBC Luciano says ‘you can create the same atmosphere at a table as you can do in a garden’ - if he had not been a garden designer he would apparently have been a chef.

None of the Chelsea designs specifically develop my idea that it is possible to be outdoors for more of our lives, if we do what we do inside outside – cooking, eating, sitting before or after the meal (although I suspect this needs a fireplace). Provided with the right kind of outdoor space, we could be watching the garden and the sky instead of the television.

We know that fewer people are buying kitchens. Is it because they don’t see the potential of these spaces? Or because they have no money? Is it no longer a good investment? Or they are bored with what they see? Should the industry – if I can call it that – be embarrassed? Is it simply poor service?

What makes up a kitchen? When giving a series of talks in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, I asked professionals to shut their eyes for a few moments and imagine their dream kitchen. When I prompted them to answer, no one said appliances or cabinets – they mentioned very emotional things such as long views, happy conversations, long lunches, warm moments of family life. In the last 20 years,  the space in kitchens has expanded, but only 30% of floor space is used for culinary tasks. The rest is used for social activities. Perhaps we should call them SOCIAL kitchens. Regardless, we are in an historical period when the kitchen is re-inventing itself in front of our eyes.

We take advantage of this by going with the forces of social change, responding to new working habits, cooking and eating trends, evolving ideas about privacy and leisure and enjoyment of the bigger spaces courtesy of central heating and insulation, and the newly appreciated desire for natural light and connection to the garden.

Using furniture as a planning device is at the philosophical core for me. It brings freedom. It tunes into people’s traditional idea of furnishing – the art of placement,  arranging things, compromising, and of putting things together. Space around each piece leaves mental space for expression. It creates variation, 3D movement, flexibility. These items might be sourced from your parents, acquired from a flea market, or commissioned. It is not a commercial process that is taking place here;  it’s a simple, traditional way of furnishing but one that has an intelligent inner core to which most ordinary people can relate. And this brings rich psychological content, history and culture. It establishes a story. A bit of soul is possible, so necessary at the heart of our home.

How do we entice customers? A revitalized industry will not listen to obvious or in-your-face wisdom of simplistic customer demand, but rather develop creative partnerships with suppliers, artisans and customers. New organizations like the South Coast Design Forum and the Society of British Interior Design already offer networking and support opportunities to bring all sides of industry together. Innovation does not happen by giving people what they have already. A kitchen designer needs to wear many hats at the same time – to listen, empathize and propose. We want creative partnerships, not sales driven businesses.

The vehicle for making this happen is the artisan, whom I define as an intelligent maker, a word re-emerging into English back from the Italian origin. It would be an historic first to have an industry that went beyond being sales people for the giants paid by commission and become a source for multiple artisan skills where design and making merge a lot more than now - including woodworkers, tile makers to painters, combining 3D design skills, interior, décor, furniture, lighting design, building and architectural ones too – to help our customers live more comfortably in their walls. My experience is that small companies often innovate best as creativity and motivation have a better chance. Creative people abound in this country of ours. Our art and design schools train more than can get jobs – why can’t they be employed more in the kitchen industry?

How do we get there? We need to set up a multi-disciplined technical, arts and design programme, at a college level. An advanced Kitchen Academy. Actually, I can tell you its nearly here. Lynn Jones of the National School of Furniture at Bucks New University is setting up a course for kitchen design. With your support this could break the mould and turn the UK into a leader in global kitchen design, as has been the case with the fashion industry. I can see neuroscience and psychology being taught alongside woodworking, tile-making, ergonomics and soft geometry. How exciting would that be?. Who knows, they may even throw in a few lessons on cooking – something that few kitchen designers do apparently!

You may be surprised to know that the artisan contribution to the kitchen industry is already higher than you think. Of the average spend on a UK kitchen of approximately £6500, £3000 goes to the fitters. Shall we call them craftsmen or artisans or maybe designers in waiting?  I am sure we have designers and art school graduates who would like to make things? We have workforce from both sides of the equation waiting for further education.

I have spent my life thinking about the kitchen as a place, not as cabinets or appliances but as an expression of a new kind of home architecture that responds to our instincts. An exploration of kitchen culture and the pursuit of an art of kitchen design. I have seen massive changes in the kitchen over the last thirty years and its going in the right direction, but it needs to go much further. A newly revitalized industry that collaborates with artisans and education could deliver something a whole lot more civilised.

Editor’s Note: This speech by Johnny Grey was originally given at Grand Designs Live on the 5th of May, 2011. For more, see Johnny’s post on The Kitchen Debate with Kevin McCloud.

As editor of KBB Review, Andrew Davies began by voicing the kitchen industry’s umbrage at Kevin’s comments that cabinetry was mostly overpriced, with little difference in quality between a £5K or £50K kitchen. Andrew explained there were really two separate kitchen industries – the mass market at £6.5K and the bespoke starting at  £20K. It is not hard to see why customers don’t get service or design included in the former and rarely in the latter.

Kevin McCloud called for more transparency around manufacturing, and the opportunity for customers to meet the workers. Ethics and artisanship are both ways of improving value for money. Paying high prices for lookalike fashion-inspired cabinetry is wrong in his view. He agrees with our tweet that ‘the designer is a valuable aspect of the kitchen process’. I assume he would like design service separately itemised, not included in margins, as I advocate. He clearly has a preference for the hand-made, as do most of us, especially those that have a history, design or art background, because design is the means through which creativity is expressed. It is also the medium through which householders can express their personalities: going for the ‘autobiographical’ home is one of Kevin’s 43 principles.

Martin Gill of Poggenpol cleverly nicked an IKEA shelf panel from a display and compared it with their version, demonstrating clearly what quality manufacturing buys, pointing out that only 40% of a budget is spent on cabinetry. His four parts of a ‘kitchen’ included appliances, countertops, cabinetry and fitting, with unfortunately no mention of the environment or design, as pointed out by a member of the audience.

IKEA sent their range strategist, Gerry Dufresne, who told us that with worldwide sales of one million kitchens they can be ‘eco’ with a policy of minimal use of materials and in doing so, take advantage of large-scale production to keep prices low. Intriguing, clever and cheap, IKEA leaves the customer to provide the excitement, as theirs is basically a well-designed DIY product. It will be interesting to see how they compete with Howden’s who are providing a story to their DIY and trade kitchens.

Simon Grantham of Miele explained how quality and engineering is ‘core eco’ and how being family run keeps a company on track, which seems true in this case. His contribution was a lesson in German commitment to long term and ethical values.

I spoke up for the customer’s right to creativity. I found myself thinking of Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas as expressed in his TED YouTube video (or in The Element, his new book). Creativity is an integral part of a customizable product and one that customers all too often fail to experience. I mentioned artisan makers and small companies, whom I feel offer the best route to the above, as well as to customer service. Buying a kitchen is an emotional transaction, not just financial; furniture, in addition to making the space comfortable, is at the core of kitchen design. I suggested there is a need for a college course to study kitchens, an area that is now central to home design. We are trapped by the history of the meaning of the word.

So, was the debate worth it? Yes, but it barely scratched the surface. In the words of Kevin McCloud, it’s about ethics, value, and service. The industry needs to be jolted into raising its game. The design institutions should link up with education to develop a joined-up design service. Why do customers at the higher end, or simply those that want to maximizes their home space, have to employ a kitchen designer (all too often a sales person in disguise), a kitchen manufacturer, an architect, a builder, a lighting designer, an electrician and an interior decorator?

When a customer employs a kitchen company, they are entitled to a holistic experience, maybe like having a personal chef prepare you a meal; he or she must plan for your taste, choose the right ingredients, and tailor it to your appetite. Clients want more than an empathetic health check for their kitchen, albeit with a prescription for improved cabinetry. The environment matters, but so too does unique and personalised content. An artisan maker can build something for them that is well-made, even if basic, in these lean times when insisting on creativity, passion and good things seems like going against the grain.

It is important to realize that it is not a replacement for a kitchen. It is an additional facility, a rough luxe version where you can forget worries about storage where the furniture is plants as well as functional pieces of the carpentered variety. The locus is maybe still cooking, ideally with an open fire or with a suitable appliance for barbecuing but its companion function, and perhaps most critical one, is its role for outdoor congregation, either around a fire or with a table – placed in the open or under shade or weather protection of some kind. The third use is a more private one – communing with nature, de-stressing and enjoying the garden’s poetic and aesthetic pleasures.

The gardens that surround our homes are often divorced from the rooms inside and out of sync with views from key windows. Kitchens and living rooms are often designed to promote internal priorities such as maximizing size, serious décor work, circulation or, historically, making a fireplace work. According to research, the average Westerner spends 80% of their time indoors. The expectation our bodies have accumulated through evolution is the reverse.

In our search for well-being we need to develop living habits that allow us to be outside for much longer. We are hard-wired, as neuroscientists such as John Zeisel tell us, for prolonged exposure to the flowers, plants, green space and sky. Access to nature, as well as exposure to long views and seasonal routines, keeps us calm. Part of my work at JG Studios has been to develop a concept I have termed “instinct-based design”.

Creating outdoor kitchens is part of that programme. By listening to our instincts we can make kitchens and gardens that work together and make us feel good. The effort, time and expenditure that people lavish on their gardens is often wasted as the rooms of the house where most of time is spent are not visible.

Without French doors, growing beautiful flowers, trimming hedges, mowing the lawn, filling pots, building ponds and construct rose arbors’ seem a little wasted. ‘You own what you see’ has been attributed to Capability Brown. How many of us have that pleasure in our gardens?

JG Studios have been asked recently to design a number of garden kitchens and will be exhibiting at the London Chelsea Flower Show (25th-29th May) with Alitex - makers of conservatories and greenhouses and endorsed by the National Trust. It will be a great opportunity to explore the new concept of the garden kitchen further.