I think we all know she was a cook – or it’s very easy to find this out.  I would like to remember some other things about my aunt.

She could not bear being told what to do.  I’m not sure what led to this, but while still in her teens she ran away from home.  She was fed up with family life, such as it was at Wootton Manor in Sussex, and she had plans to become an actress.  The Oxford Playhouse proved a temporary stop, as she and one of its company, Charles Gibson Gowen, escaped to sea in a barge.  They kept one step ahead of the Germans as war broke out until arrested in Venice and subsequently freed by the American ambassador.  She embraced the chaos of the war, working for much of it at the British Army intelligence library in Cairo.  Afterwards, she wrote cookery books, apparently to prove her worth to another (married) lover.

I first knew my aunt properly when she was recovering from a stroke and had lost her sense of taste. What to do?  My father was her doctor and he suggested, along with others, that she open a shop.  She liked this challenge.  It turned out she had been collecting addresses of potteries, cast-iron foundries, chinaware companies, artisan knife makers and tin ware manufacturers during her repeated trips to France. Her favourite shops were ironmongers, ideally French, where the British bought their cookery ware as no cookshops existed then.  From one trip she bought back a collection of cast brass cup hooks and asked me if I could get them made here as there was no English equivalent.  That was my job, fixing things.  As her nephew my duties included changing light bulbs, building bookshelves and sink cabinets and gassing cupboards for woodworm in her Chelsea terrace.

A bus journey to 44 Bourne St Pimlico found me facing an industrial sized plate glass window in an ugly, modern, narrow shop front. A table placed across the entire width to display basic French tin ware, piled high, looked like nothing I had seen before.  Inside were pots set on garage shelves with straw strewn about and bread crocks on the floor and a staircase leading to a concrete basement.  Visiting the shop was my top priority when escaping boarding school for the holidays.  Liza (as we called her) most often hid in the stockroom (people constantly wanted her advice and she found it exhausting) on a bar stool, knees to one side at an old pine dresser.  This doubled up as desk, samples spot, notice board and waiting-to-be-filed zone.  She dressed in black and white, with black, thick-rimmed glasses. I was always welcome and was offered Nescafe in small white porcelain coffee cups.  The place smelled of disque bleu cigarettes, fresh ones and stale.

Customers and friends from all over the world brought trade samples and seasonal food.  I remember figs, persimmons, walnuts and cheeses.  In the basement the objects took on glamour.  She styled things in her shop in a casual but eye-catching and unusual way, the lighting borrowed from a photographer’s studio.  Stock moved so fast when it first opened that everything was sold within a month. Other retailers quickly caught on, even Terence Conran admitted her influence on Habitat in later years. Independent cookshops sprung up in high streets in USA, Australia and here.

Her own kitchen was full of exotic clutter, freestanding furniture, piles of books and strange cooking equipment.  No units and long countertops for her - just a decent table, a stove and some good few dressers and a capacious old cupboard.  I loved visiting just to hang about in that kitchen.

My aunt’s spirit is captured in Artemis Coopers’ excellent biography, Writing at the Kitchen Table.  She excelled in writing, conversation and enjoyment of being in a kitchen.  One last rebellion – her mother had banned Elizabeth and her sisters from ever going into her kitchen at Wootton to prevent them getting in the cook’s way, but she ended up by practically living in one: I installed a stylish cane day bed in her final ‘winter kitchen’.

Literature is very much a source of inspiration for the kitchens we design at Johnny Grey Studios, whether to conjure creativity or explore how the latest neuroscience research might affect kitchen design. Here’s a list of several food and garden books Johnny has picked up this year, and he recommends you do the same. (And if you missed this last year, make sure to check out Johnny’s Most Delicious Reads from 2010.)

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.

When I was driving my aunt Elizabeth David around Wales in pursuit of her research into historic ovens for her bread book in the early 1970s, I did not appreciate her obsessive interest in how ovens worked. Now I understand, at least in relation to cob ovens. These ovens miraculously transform the flavour and texture of bread, pizza and roasted vegetables. Radiant heat given off by the clay walls cooks food quite differently from the network of heat-producing electric elements in the metal boxes that are modern ovens.

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.