I believe the public is often deprived of creativity when buying a new kitchen. This is the reason why I am calling for  the setting up the Kitchen Creative Index: it’s a list of actions that would ensure every customer gets a kitchen environment which has sound ergonomics and suits their personality, home space and budget requirements, and has sustainable thinking built in.

In financially straightened times when resources are limited it’s right moment to unleash the powers of creativity to make well developed kitchen designs. This involves a two step process, empathetic listening and inventive thinking is followed by meticulous sifting and refining of the design to make it work. It’s not only the artistic and style elements that need including in the design proposal but a focused attention on value for money and ergonomics. Blue-sky thinking should open up the use of new materials, sustainable appliances, lighting design, which of the home owners possessions can be incorporated and how effectively the architecture is deployed.

There are unknowns ahead for uninitiated clients (and if there aren’t, there should be). A good customer relationship starts with exploring these unknowns and unblocking preset ideas. This is a productive process that counters the general suspicion of the unfamiliar and helps allay anxiety. Many of our regular commercial transactions are unemotional purchases. However purchasing a kitchen environment should not be like buying a collection of products; it’s a service and multi-faceted one at that.

Our job as kitchen makers is to provide the consumer with ideas that translate into a physical product, not the other way round. Good ergonomics, a high sociability factor and abstract notions such as providing meaning through individual associations of objects do matter. (Neuroscience studies will tell you that the brain uses surroundings as ways of recalling memories – we have more emotional connection to things we use or decorate our homes with than we may realize). Alienation comes about when we don’t identify with our environments. Dull, copycat brochure led kitchens are a case in point.

Childhood memories, scenes from places we have visited or things we have loved, whether objects on a mantelpiece or a vintage armchair that our granny used to sit on should be included in the story-board for a kitchen design. Favourite colours that have no easily identifiable reason for being liked help make up a ‘mental map of comfort’. As kitchen makers we need to connect with our customers so we can create a wonderful physical world of surfaces you can stroke, places to perch, furniture that helps the body move smoothly from one culinary activity to another that provide hints of pleasure scattered throughout the room.

Over the next few months, starting at Grand Designs Live next Sunday, I will be talking about the Kitchen Creative Index at a number of public events, sponsored by Miele UK. What should kitchen companies and the design professions offer their customers in the way of creative guarantee? What should customers expect?  With luck this will help rebuild confidence and increase the status of the kitchen industry and make the whole process of buying a kitchen more enjoyable and better value for money.

Please get touch with ideas for ideas you think should be in this manifesto. Email  enquiries@johnnygrey.co.uk;  facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Johnny-Grey-Studios; twitter @Johnny Grey.

Grand Designs Live is on Sunday 13^th at 4pm. I will be in discussions with George Clarke. Please come and join us in live debate.

I used to think designing a kitchen was all about aesthetics, ergonomics and craftsmanship. Now it is about something else less tangible which amounts to understanding what kind of environments make people feel happiest at home: a move from the outer world inwards.

The secret to a really effective kitchen is a compact cooking zone, as this allows enough space to available to fulfill the room’s expanded role as a ‘living’ space. Focusing on the room’s culinary effectiveness is no longer enough. A space once dedicated exclusively to cooking, clearing up and food storage is now a heavily-used social area that is also an emotional sanctuary, with an umbilical cord to the garden. During the last expansion we pulled down walls, now we add fold-back doors to bring nature in. Most communal life talks place in the kitchen: conversations round the table, prep, using laptops, dumping books and toys, listening to music and the radio, perching, cooking, snacking, polishing shoes, charging phones, mending bicycles and doing the ironing. Slowly we are expanding outdoors too.

The multiple-platform character of the kitchen makes it fall close to what sociologist Ray Oldenburgh calls the ‘Third Space’, an indeterminate public setting for active, joined-up lives like pubs or coffee bars. Key social trends in families with both partners working result in time at home together becoming limited. As many children have long school hours leisure time is highly scheduled for all, indicating that every house needs a genuine, flexible common room where encounters can be turned into effective exchanges and a host of different activities can be accommodated.

I believe the real drivers of home design are our hard-wired needs, our instincts, and it is time for these to be properly recognized. Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire tells how our brains became human-sized through the nutritional benefits of cooked food, freeing early humans from spending all their time searching for food and eating it. Cooking promoted sociability as collaborative households were more successful at maximizing food resources. We know that the brain is elastic and grows when acquiring new skills. It is as if the impact of social trends accumulates in the brain’s synapses. Our behaviour at home, how we work, live and use our leisure time, ultimately becomes incorporated into the structure of our brains. The design of new-style expanded kitchens is in tune with these developments.

Psychology, neuroscience and ergonomics overlap in the complex processes of putting a kitchen environment together. Decisions about shapes, materials, choices of décor rub together with practical considerations on counter heights, floor surfaces or whether to align a sink cabinet with a window. Which do you satisfy, the urge for a view that could mean a smaller sink or a reduced size draining board? Do you find space for an antique dresser or a desk and sacrifice having a sofa. Can you squeeze in a painting not another wall cupboard? Emotion is regularly pitched against function. These might seem trivial dilemmas but there is urgency about creating a relaxing ambience as contemporary life is full of anxiety. A large part of the news that streams into our homes is made up of environmental and economic disaster, war, poverty, over-population and violence. Anything we can do to offset this, to calm ourselves and shore up a sense of well-being must be done.

Domestic spaces, and the design of them, play a real role in our day-to-day happiness. Design and décor might appear trivial compared with the emotional maturity that family relationships demand. However, a well-run household is a space in which to live at ease in the natural rhythms of daily life. We cannot escape the psychological impact of how a room looks and feels. Our brains constantly pick up visual clues even without wanting to. Colours for example have an emotional quotient: think of the different effects on mood of red and blue, yellow and green. And of course every object contains a story, older things perhaps the most evocative. Berkeley professor Clare Cooper Marcus investigates the hold that our past and present dwellings exert on us in her book House as Mirror of Self (1995). Many people she interviewed found their homes uncomfortable for reasons that had nothing to do with ordinary issues about design or privacy. Marcus writes that ‘we unconsciously reproduce aspects of our childhood homes as adults, our surroundings somehow tethered to this core’, adding that someone ‘may rent a house that is completely inappropriate for his needs, without being aware his childhood home is still reverberating in his unconscious’.

In the eighties when I developed the Unfitted Kitchen, the kitchen made with furniture, the response from many people was one of relief that you could furnish the kitchen again like any other room. Units around walls were not the dominant feature anymore. Ownership returned to the user and cooking was no longer the main function of the space. As Karen Fisher, editor of Cosmopolitan, said a few years back, ‘home decoration is the most personal path to self expression, next to making love’.

We rely on ‘home’, a resonant word whose shaded meanings each of us generate from our childhood memories for our sense of belonging and rootedness. As the epitome of home, the kitchen is often represented in fairy tales and folk tales, in those cottages and castles we connect with emotionally. The animals in The Wind in the Willows have wonderful kitchens. This is Badger’s:

The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.

As many of us live in pre-built houses we have to be ingenious in creating our new kitchen spaces. With new-build though we can move fastest towards the home of the future, the ‘kitchen centric’ house. This depends on developers offering improved designs and homeowners recognising how much the design of their homes can be enhanced. The good news is that today we are far more aware of the hidden forces behind our conscious choices than were previous generations, so we can take our psychological needs more fully into account when designing this pivotal room.

I really enjoyed sitting down being entertained for a day.  The element of surprise, the emotional impact and mix of different contents are intoxicating in a way that most design events are not. Here the sheer variation was heart-warming.  Alvaro Restrepo, his childhood re-enacted as a silent dance, produced his band of Colombian street kids out of the dark.  These highly-skilled dancers gave me the first buzz of the day with a series of evocative scenes. Accompanied by Buskaid Soweto’s string ensemble, this magical collaboration made me feel the world coming together from different corners, bringing welcome escapism.  Then, dancing psychologist Peter Lovatt transferred feeling to our bodies getting us to dance in our seats.  [make link better] If that is possible imagine what you can do in a kitchen?

Miguel Torres, Spanish MD of the eponymous company, told us how his wine company was going to make wine an eco-drink.  I can go on drinking the stuff and feel good about it!  Next on the agenda was optimism, with Tali Sharot explaining how we have loads of this for our families but not for the state, an explanation for the way pessimism enters public life so easily.

Dance and music made the harrowing but brilliant speaker of the day, Giles Durley and his mutilated body, bearable.  Plan B, the white rapper was blunt as well as formidable in his analysis of disaffected youth.  Was he there for his music or his message?

Local TEDx are less corporate than their bigger brothers, and at £65 instead of $5000 per head, more democratic too.  If T stands for technology, E entertainment and D Design then E dominated through music and dance.  John Mullholland, the Observer editor, was truly superb as the announcer and comic interlude.  Thank you to every speaker for a really well-designed day.

For live video footage:   http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL880EAF3F736F99AC

The small and stylish Pimlico café Tomtom is the venue for my first ‘kitchen conversation’ with anyone who wants to come along. This is an idea I’ve had for some time, waiting to put into action. I’ll bring my laptop and tell some stories and we can explore the idea of the happy kitchen, listen to a few grievances and think together how to turn them to advantage. You’re most welcome to bring photos and tell us what make houses special. Coffee, tea and later wine will be served.

When I recently met Tom Assheton, proprietor of Tomtom (I designed his kitchen some years ago) he suggested hosting such an event. Café conversation, characterized by a openness possible with strangers, was one reason for the success of new public meeting spaces in the 17th century, coffee houses, exemplified by Pepys and his Covent Garden room upstairs.  Today we have many neighborhood cafés but don’t use them for the relaxed exchange of ideas.  My idea is to recreate that spirit with a hosted conversation to get people talking together on a topic of mutual interest.

As space is limited please call to register at Tomtom 020 7730 1771 or email info@johnnygrey.com.  Time and place: 4.30 pm 20 March 2012, Tomtom’s, corner of Ebury and Elizabeth Streets SW1, cost: £15 at the door.

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Those interested in the tradition of café sociability and authors who have written on it should check out this USA booklist: http://www.richmondactiondialogues.com/books.htm.  A favourite of mine is The Third Space by Ray Oldenburgh, which even gave a name to a political movement, The Third Way.  Seattle is a place where this is happening, as you can see on http://www.conversationcafe.org/host.htm.

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.