My family spent a day hanging out, dilettantely poking around stalls, meeting friends, while the music wafted across from the perimeter grandstands, walking down the movie-set, instant-retro main street and stopping at victualling spots.  Bars offering Festival of Britain food and drink, Abbey Road studios music snapshots rubbed shoulders with stores like Cath Kidson, with her fifties style household products. Star of India providing curry takeaways faster than you can pay for them, Fortnum & Mason serving out high-class teas with tables set looking at the Leisure Dome and the Veuve Clicquot champagne garden providing ample opportunity for people watching.

The vintage cars made for a great entrée, including the cars that never went mass market, like the Frisky. Caravan culture made its presence felt with making do, camping for the liberated post war working classes a reminder of popular cultures contribution to British cool, and British fashion’s street credentials. As we ambled around ephemera from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, I speculated that once something becomes cool it has reached a tipping point. Many years later it’s recycled and an era is recalled as part of its memory. Is that where nostalgia creeps in? Things make a much more immediate impact on us than political or social stories because we can touch them. Clothes, motor scooters and vases that evoke personal memories  become time markers.

Vintage Goodwood reminded me of how much popular culture has contributed to the rich diversity of design we have in this country; of how the visual world is really a kind of language, of how its makes us feel inclusive and its part in our national identity. It welds us into a broader family of American & European culture that I remain grateful to be a part of.

A big thanks to Wayne and the Hemingway family.  I hope you stage it again. There is lots more gold to mine along this yellow brick road.

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?

Familiar with much of his ideas after reading In Defence of Food, I learnt new facts such as that the average American has gained 18 lbs since the 1980’s when low fat and diet products were introduced. This is the opposite of what what was originally intended. The food industry discovered a way to sell more food by demonizing fat and replacing it with salt and sugar. They persuaded the public that diet food was good for us and we could binge as much as we liked.

Pollan says it is not just what we eat but also how we eat that is crucial. One of his food rules is to eat at a table, whenever possible, in the company of others. It reduces both greed and speed, and improves digestion and pleasure. He has summed up the job of kitchen designers in a nutshell. During the 1980s, kitchens were created where you could not have conversations because the work surfaces faced the walls, showroom spaced clad in plastic, shiny surfaces and matching doors. Domesticity was too old fashioned or simply too difficult to mass produce.

The kitchen industry needs to avoid the unintended results created by the food industry – the consumption of large quantities of food has led to large cabinetry and appliances. The focus should be on creating spaces for living, eating, prepping and cooking. Instinct tells us everything we need to know. We want to be in a room because it feels like home.

A kitchen has simple needs: modest-sized, freestanding furniture pieces for each major function (like cooking, prepping and washing up), minimal countertops, a walk-in larder and a storage cupboard or two, a decent table, access to the outdoors and panoramic eye contact. And don’t forget about a place to make a mess, have a drink, chill out, experiment, and generally behave like you live there.

So throw out your matching units, continuous counters and matching doors with repetitive handles. You have nothing to loose but convention, and everything to gain. More space, less cost, more of you in the surroundings and less of being self consciously stylish, more playing with colour and use of vintage pieces. Enjoy discovering your inner interior designer.

When I first developed the idea of the unfitted kitchen in 1984, it was a protest against rigid, wall-based counters in a single finish. The new, modern unfitted kitchen is a negotiated settlement between the two. The truth is that it’s hard to use only freestanding pieces to make a highly efficient culinary centre, but it can be done with size-specific pieces.  What’s new to our current design thinking is that the social activities of eating, gathering around and multi-tasking on the table are now considered of equal importance in terms of space allocation. The civilizing aspects of good interior design need to be hard wired into the ergonomics.

We see the customer as a joint designer and collaborator, not just for supplying their personal requirements for the brief, but also assisting us with all aspects of the décor and finding vintage pieces we can incorporate at the heart of the design. The end result should not feel like a visit has taken place by a kitchen cabinet salesman, more like a passing ergonomist who is a space provocateur with a secret interest in long lunches and a passion for art. That does not mean in-your-face design from our end. Our furniture should give pleasure but be modest and easy to live with. Our plate rack prototype below illustrates our intentions.

Tell us what you think about our conspicuous, non-consumptive approach to kitchen design.

It was at Dove Cottage, overlooking Grasmere in Cumbria in Northwest England, he wrote his most celebrated poetry. The family called the room they occupied for everyday living the Houseplace, a local Lake District term for an all-encompassing parlor. Modest in size at about 15 ft by 20 ft, it was cosy, easy to heat and was used in conjunction with the kitchen.

A simple, prosaic word, ‘Houseplace’ is an example of the innovative ways Wordsworth used common language to express his most heart-felt ideas. One of the core beliefs of the Romantic movement was that nature represented something close to heaven on earth, and a simple, rustic way of life gave people access to this.

I recently took my family to stay in a house just above Dove Cottage rented from Landmark Trust. We saw it from our window each day and walked through the garden to reach it. Although a popular pilgrimage for tourists and Brits alike, the tours, room-by-tiny-room, transport you back in time. You can see where Wordsworth wrote his best poems, some of them undoubtedly on the table in the Houseplace. You can still feel its atmosphere and appreciate the worn, aging fabric, panelling and floors, with low light – yes, I feel at home here.

I want to exit with the last few lines of “The Prelude”, which make you realize why the contrast between indoors and being in nature are so complementary:
Those recollected hours that have the charm

Of visionary things, and lovely forms

And sweet sensations, that throw back our life

And almost make our infancy itself

A visible scene, on which the sun is shining

An unassuming quiet-spoken woman, she dominated Disney design for half a century. The stylishness and vibrant color of Disney films in the early 1940s through mid-1950s came primarily from her brush. In her prime, she was an amazingly prolific American artist who enlivened and influenced the not-so-small worlds of film, print, theme parks, architectural decor, and advertising. Her art represented joyful creativity and communicated pure pleasure to the viewer. Her exuberant fantasies brimmed with beauty, charm and wit, melding a child’s fresh eye with adult experience.

Animator Marc Davis, who put Mary’s exciting use of color on a par with Matisse, recalled, “She brought modern art to Walt in a way that no one else did. He was so excited about her work.” Mary’s unique color and styling greatly influenced many Disney postwar productions most notably The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Mary assisted in the design of the It’s a Small World attraction for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair (blame the music on the Sherman Brothers). She contributed to the design of many exhibits, attractions, and murals at the theme parks in California and Florida, including the fanciful murals in the Grand Canyon Concourse at the Contemporary Hotel.

As Johnny mentioned, the literal translation of ideas can capture atmospheres and events, similar to the way scenes from films capture an emotion or experience we identify with. Mary Blair’s art perfectly captures the scale and color of my early boomer childhood, and takes me there with the speed of PF Flyers to hideouts and imaginary forts of blankets over furniture. Though much of Blair’s work veers toward abstraction, her use of color and the storytelling aspect in her pictures, especially the underlying emotions expressed in much of her art, somehow transport me to a cozy and dreamlike place.

Instead of a single color or one veneer, we playfully use a mixture of color and wood in a painterly fashion.  Legendary animator Frank Thomas said, “Mary was the first artist I knew of to have different shades of red next to each other. You just didn’t do that! But Mary made it work.”

Like Carroll’s surrealist creation, a kitchen can bring such imaginative pleasure. Johnny says to escape is a great release; to dream and not quite understand is in some ways like visiting Venice, Machu Picchu or Gaudi’s Parc Guell. Blair’s biographer John Canamaker perhaps put it best when he wrote, “I feel great pleasure merely gazing at a work by Mary Blair. It’s as delicious as feasting on rainbows.”

So wrote Jeanette Winterton in Saturday’s Guardian in an article entitled “For the Love of Food.” She continues: “Our culture has endeavoured to make food as artificial and synthetic as possible – then it is predictable and can be controlled.”

This statement is applicable to our entire food culture, including the environment in which it is created. Winterton’s piece was a memorial to Rose Gray, the co-founder of the River Café, London’s most revered Italian restaurant.

Gray passed away last week. Winterson refers to my late aunt, food writer Elizabeth David, as Rose’s chief mentor and explains also how ED’s (as family and friends called her) writing changed British food for the better. This struck a personal chord for me, as Elizabeth David was also my mentor both personally and in my early days as a kitchen designer.

British food was dreadful during late 19^th and most of the 20^th century, just as British kitchens were anti-social, back rooms that made cooking a drudgery. Could there be a link? Was British food better before the industrial revolution? Elizabeth David felt that it was, and that our best or most ‘real’ cooking was historically done in the nation’s farmhouses, not in restaurants, in a similar manner to how things are done in France.

From local cheeses to cured meats, these farmhouses were the source of regional cooking.  It is no coincidence that the most endearing model for the kitchen is the ‘farmhouse kitchen’. It conjures up happy thoughts, ideas of abundance, rough and ready but homely meals being served up on a refectory table, with the the entire family gathered around.

So perhaps Winterson could be describing not just food but British (and American) kitchens too, with the industry making them artificial and predictable so they can be controlled, i.e. turned out efficiently from factories, easy to sell and install.

For years, I have had an aching desire to capture some of the transferable pleasures of eating – the sociability, the feeling of living well – to the place where we eat and cook. I don’t want these spaces to be organised as an expression of commercial ease, but rather to be private expressions of ourselves. So when Winterson goes on to say ‘real cooks only follow a recipe once’, and then they build on it with inventiveness and reinterpret it according to available seasonal ingredients, I would agree.

The same applies to kitchen design. It’s a messy and creative process and no formula exists that works twice. Every house, family, space has its own unique footprint and way of living. I want to offer a big thank you to Jeanette Winterson for her thoughts that allowed me to make the connection. How about a new saying for modernists, that function follows food? Let’s hope real food brings more love to real kitchens in the future.

Where better to start than with Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows or the Secret Garden? Imagine a house with a hidden, metal studded front door hidden in the bushes. We recently created just such a passageway for a client on the coast near Chichester, England. Although it doesn’t involve a magical kingdom, the key idea was building an extension that hides behind an old garden wall. Literal translation of ideas is one approach but another is capturing of atmospheres and events, similar to the way scenes from films capture an emotion or experience we identify with.

There are plentiful examples where imaginary scenes can be translated into reality. Who has not thought of Aladdin’s cave when design a snug, cosy media room or Rapunzel’s tower or Treasure Island’s tree house when creating a bedroom? Robert Adam wanted to be an artist before becoming an architect and was inspired by Gothic fantasies, old ruins, imaginary places and tales of old Italian buildings. Places, studying buildings from history and previous lifetimes where children’s stories are often set are default starting points.

Rarely are children’s stories set in the present. The imagination seems to work better in the past although science fiction would argue for the future. An example of such a children’s story is Louis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which is full of extreme spatial experiences such as Alice shrinking and falling fast through the rabbit’s hole, landing in a hallway with seemingly unending locked doors. She is puzzled, thwarted and confused. Ever had this experience with entering buildings? Carroll’s humour and his surrealist creation bring such pleasure. To escape is a great release; to dream and not quite understand is in some ways like visiting Venice, Machu Picchu or Gaudi’s Parc Guell.

One of the most memorable scenes in the book is the Mad Hatter’s Tea party, with the long table, white cloth, orderly cups and saucers offset by egotistical, high impact companions with extreme clothes. Everyone is chattering but no one is engaging in real conversation. No room, cries the March Hare, Mad Hatter and Doormouse There’s plenty, retorts Alice as she takes a seat. Alice quickly retreats from the madness and re-enters the wood.

After a consultation with the Caterpillar, she soon comes upon a house where the Duchess is feeding a baby. As our heroine enters the kitchen, the cook takes the cauldron of soup off the fire and then showers Alice with saucepans, plates and dishes. Taking no notice of the flying debris, the Queen announces her famous command, ‘Off with her head!’.

Tenniel’s illustration of this scene is dominated by the Queen’s oversized head, but you can see the vestiges of a kitchen around them. I speculate what kind of kitchen Lewis Carroll’s and his illustrator would have made for Alice. Witty chaos maybe, unpredictable meals made of strange Marinetti-like ingredients, a lot of talking, including speculation about the world’s geometry, and strange Harry Potter-like magic going on in the background. Plates flying through the air, magic carpets, talking chandeliers, clocks that run backwards and anthropomorphic animals gathered around the table.

Throughout Carroll’s story, the accelerated speed of events and unexpected changes of scale provide challenging experiences of space. Fast moving conversations and a variety of perching places remind me of the joys of large families and big rooms. The open fire and the cat curled up on the floor suggest a sort of normality.

If anyone reading this wants to sketch their imaginary Alice in Wonderland kitchen, I will post it here. Meanwhile I have booked my tickets for the Portsmouth premiere of Tim Burton’s cinematic interpretation of Carroll’s tale. I can’t wait to see how Burton and his creative team have imagined the interiors, although in some ways I would like to keep my unformed and innocent imaginings. Carroll’s writing, although energetic and full of colour and content, left an openness to the imagination that makes room for all of us.

 
Brizo launched three new products: Venuto with clean, modern; Virage, a fluid, gentle twist that is also quirky and unexpected; Talo, inspired by organic shapes with hints of steam punk.

All are chock full of technological features as well. SmartTouch replaces grip handles, while Magnedock is a pull-down, handheld nozzle, kept in place by a magnet. Do we really need this new technology for taps? From an environmental perspective, it is crucial way of limiting water use.
 
There are witty touches too. Talo, which is inspired by bluebell shapes, has a vase for holding fresh herbs or flowers. Who would of thought of this to include behind your sink? There is also a bathroom collection in the same style where shelf brackets and a tilting wall mirror add surprise to their faucet collection.
 
Never before did I realize I needed a education in taps and faucets or enjoy it so much, along with the twenty other design bloggers from all over the USA who flew in to share the same experience. Brizo is a company that welds fashion into implements that control water. Sound ridiculous? Not anymore.
 

We probably know why they look the same, too. ‘No time for real design and no demand for original design’. Market research is often the excuse of the unimaginative for not doing something. I experienced this during my days at Smallbone. The Unfitted Kitchen did not have a market before we created one – and now freestanding furniture is happily back in our design lexicon. We took an intuitive risk.

Think of what great product designers have done to advance design. These include Mark Newsome, Thomas Heatherwick or Marcel Wanders, or architects such as Frank Gehry and Glenn Murcutt. The big fashion houses do the same thing everyday – they create edgy designs that people love, or at the very least will wear. Details first seen on the catwalk become part of our daily design vocabulary a few seasons later.

Why can’t we kitchen designers learn a little from these guys? On Friday Feb 12, during Jason Wu’s fashion show during New York Fashion Week, I have a chance to ask him what the kitchen industry could learn from what he does.

It is possible to solve a brief well, be original and sell your ideas to a client regardless of the size of the budget. You have to do four things: take the client through an unblocking process to establish a unique and personal brief; be prepared to say ‘no’ on occasion; communicate your ideas well; and have a passionate understanding of your craft.

*Please note the title of the blog is a dialectical tribute to Ian Dury’s song Reasons to Be Cheerful Part 3.