Messy kitchens, happy living?  I think so.  The first time I go into a house the sight of the kitchen reveals much about the owner’s world view.  Exaggerated tidiness can mean little cooking,  too much time spent cleaning or simply not much use of the space, with coffee-making hidden behind cupboard doors.  Kitchens wear many hats these days, the most attractive to me being like workshops for living instead of woodwork or metal-bashing.  Here the whole family can perform their lives pleasurably, with the kitchen as one of the remaining zones of creativity in our homes along with teenage bedrooms or the outside shed, except that it is also a scene of communal activity.  Neatness exacts a price and takes up too much time ,especially when young children are involved.  Adults too need to find the child in themselves and escape from bossy notions of perfection.

In A Perfect Mess, Eric Abrahamson reveals the hidden benefits of disorder, and The Comfort of Things by anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that personal clutter makes lives happier, with people who enjoy their objects also caring better for each other.  Should we not be designing kitchens with these behavioural requirements in mind?  I often wonder why magazine features always show them spotless, bereft looking?  Maybe kitchens should be appreciated not when they are tidy but when in use, even all messed up?

I find myself missing mess in the kitchen.  Our three older children are away at university or abroad and although the youngest, an enthusiastic cook, makes up for it, he is away at school for long hours.  When Tim Dowling described his boys’ nighttime cooking in last week’s Guardian Weekend I felt a surprising amount of nostalgia!  He says, ‘Downstairs I find the archaeological remains of some kind of ransacking: the contents of the refrigerator seem to have exploded across the kitchen. But I also discover evidence of a primitive form of cooperation: an attempt has been made to empty the dishwasher, and also to make brownies. Both, sadly, have failed’.

For years Becca and I cooked while the kids played, waited, watched, but now it’s sometimes the other way round with us awaiting their cooking, or we all do it together. Either way, flour lands on the floor, vegetables mix on the chopping block, four pans bubble away at different speeds, oven and dishwasher fans whirring to music from a democratically-decided queue of iPod tracks.  This is when I love the kitchen most.

A kitchen that accommodates mess would get my vote in a design competition, not a minimalistic, glossy, stainless steel package.  The winning design would include colour, texture, furniture from more than one source, signs of occupation with un-matching chairs, open shelves with displays of accumulated objects from visits to junk shops - as well as some highly functional furniture to support the cooks.  It is better, surely, to think of kitchens as busy hardworking spaces rather than status symbols.

I posted the above a few weeks back but since then have discovered there is a growing movement, Philosophers of Mess, you might call them. The New York Times ran a story, Saying Yes to Mess

Illustration Penelope Green NYT

Stop feeling bad, say the mess apologists. There are more urgent things to worry about. Irwin Kula is a rabbi based in Manhattan and author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life,” which was published by Hyperion in September. “Order can be profane and life-diminishing,” he said the other day. “It’s a flippant remark, but if you’ve never had a messy kitchen, you’ve probably never had a home-cooked meal. Real life is very messy, but we need to have models about how that messiness works.”  I am off to buy the book. It’s a justification for not clearing up all those Christmas meals to get back to the table, the fire or the telly. Our family Christmas just got a whole lot more relaxed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/garden/21mess.html?pagewanted=all

Kitchen islands are a relatively recent invention.  They first appeared in 1950s USA as a way of filling up newly expanded kitchen spaces.  The introduction of breakfast bars, probably inspired by neighbourhood diners, turned what was a cross between a range and a working table into a multi-function piece of furniture that is the star of the kitchen.  Cooking counters in diners proved the value of eating near a cooking zone as pre-served plates could be handed across the worktop for instant consumption. This allowed the island socialize the domestic kitchen by bringing eating into the heart of the culinary area. The arrival of efficient air ventilation systems on the market conveniently coincided making it possible to take the cooking hobs away from the chimney breast.

Ergonomics was the next development.  Following Henry Ford’s application of productivity theory, kitchen design eventually benefited from time and motion studies.  Surprisingly few serious attempts had been made to apply ergonomics to the kitchen by the time I started designing central Islands, and few acknowledged the social role of the kitchen.

Cindy’s diner, restored to it’s 1954 original, Kansas City.

Image courtesy of Kansas Historical Foundation

PERSONAL DISCOVERIES

My understanding of the role the island plays in lifting kitchen design to an art includes two other constituents. The Alexander Technique, a movement therapy taught in drama and music schools is based on a system of moving with a sense of economy to support the back and the body’s posture.  This led me to a concept I call ‘dedicated work surfaces’ where a culinary activity is optimized through calculating the space required to accommodate it without being overly generous, with the appropriate counter height and surface material then selected.  A balance needs to found, giving the hands space to work without involving unnecessary foot movement.  Too much space given to one kitchen activity reduces the room available for another.
My second discovery was the importance of peripheral vision. Our eyes cause our bodies to react to sharp edges and corners by becoming defensive, an alert signal going off in the brain sending low level flight and fight response signals.  I developed ‘soft geometry’, curved shapes which form natural routes between furniture and architectural features to make islands easy to negotiate, essential as islands are by their nature in the middle of a room.

NO MAN CAN LIVE ON AN ISLAND

Islands don’t exist on their own.  In a kitchen interior, arrangements need to be made between the central island and the doors, windows, walls, fridges, cupboards and tables.  The first thing to do is establish the ‘sweet spot’ or ‘driving position’, the safest and most strategic position for the cook.  Once that is located, with space left behind to protect the cook’s back (a well-established psychological need), one can assess the amount of space in front for an island, ideally with room behind for a sink cabinet.  Storage, best located in the zone between eyes and knees, is the third phase of the design.

Kitchen Island designed for clients in Memphis 2000

ALLOCATION OF WORK SPACE

The placement of prepping takes priority and is generally best sited on a corner to allow for a two-directional approach.  The cooktop should be kept in the centre, with a back-up work surface either to the right or in front. This can be a lower level surface at table height for use by children or as a pastry roll out area.  The longest work surface is the breakfast bar, we rename more accurately the food bar.  It’s for eating, serving and all purpose food display set highest of all so that it can’t be used as a prep surface.  Its users can then see what’s going on whether they sit on bar stools or perch and no one gets their hair singed as they are above the level of hot pans on the stove!

DESIGN MANNERS

Varying the mass of the island into a sequence of connected shapes creates sculptural harmony.  Some parts might even be see-through so that light can travel across the floor, from windows to the corridor to between the island and wall counters.  Installing a lighting gantry that echoes the outline shape of the island helps prevent it looking isolated or like an overgrown table. Include bars or hooks for small tools as this allows the cook sight and reach of his/her tools.  Lights enhance the rack’s function and visual appeal.  Finally, make sure the scale is right.  Small furniture in big rooms looks lost, big islands in small rooms mean you create an obstacle like something from Maurice Sendak’s Scary Monsters… After that it’s all up to the cook.

* More text on central islands can be found in a section at the back of my book Kitchen Culture

This is a draft for an article commissioned by Country Life for their March 21st  2012 edition. The news section features a link with the edited version along with a practical checklist.

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.