“Cooking is an art. By art I mean a lot of creativity and some necessary chaos. Food is a natural product and whatever is natural comes with surprising and unruly elements.”

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.

Fairy tales and children’s stories, remote though they seem for professionals offering advice or householders seeking practical improvement to their homes, are great source material. Often being stuck in the humdrum of our everyday lives, we need renewal. As a kitchen designer, I am often faced with the challenge of unblocking my clients and discouraging them from rigidly copying pictures they see in magazines, So is it possible to get real, practical ideas from what appear to be absurd fantasies? Transposing ideas is tremendously fun and challenging. And ethereal is good, as keeping the imagination loose brings flexibility to thinking.

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.

Take a name, the Goddess of water, add vision, a great designer or two, find an industrial furnace and pile of metal flakes, model the mix, sprinkle with fashion and technology and then bake until done. Keep at it for six years, invite guests to lunch, create unexpected entertainment and encourage conversation between kitchen designers and fashion designers. This is a roundabout, whimsical way of describing an event held last week by Brizo faucets during New York Fashion week, Where I was introduced to their products and company philosophy.
 
I never imagined that so much thought – and resolution of opposing ideas – could go into the making of home hardware. Fashion and function, sitting side by side, are at the core of the design of these faucets. I love that it defies the conventionally modernist way of doing design. I now have more respect for these control mechanisms for dispensing water and realize we need intelligent taps or advanced functional faucets. (Excuse my interchangeable use of “tap” and “faucet” ; this is an example of UK and UK English at its most confusing).

 
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.