Late Summer Newsletter 2026

FT Weekend festival

5 September 2026

Dear friends

If you’re in or near London this weekend how about visiting the UK’s cleverest festival, in Hampstead (of course)? This Saturday The Financial Times is holding its Weekend Festival at Kenwood House. Check out the full programme here – speaker categories are wide-ranging: Big Ideas, Food & Drink, FT Futures, FT money, House & Home, How to Spend It, Travel, Literature & Life, Tech and Arts. There is something for everyone.

I am even appearing at 2pm on the House & Home stage to explore The Chef’s Guide to Designing a Kitchen along with Ravinder Bhogal, chef, writer and founder of Jikoni; Merlin Wright, design director of Plain English; and Rebecca Rose of the FT. I’d love to meet up with you there. We will discuss how to make kitchens fun to cook and live in, looking at a range of hacks suitable for any budget. These include finding your kitchen’s sweet spot where you can chat with people, look out the window and cook all at the same time. Come along and discover tricks like replacing one or two of your kitchen units with a nice vintage piece such as a small dresser or chest of drawers and widening a windowsill into a bar, place to perch or grow herbs. That’s just from me – I can’t wait to hear from my fellow panellists.

You can also watch all the festival’s talks on demand from home. Just register for a digital pass. There really is a stellar line up of speakers. Yotam Ottolenghi will be there. Fiona Shaw. The economist Marianna Mazzucato is always exciting, likewise FT’s own Stephen Bush. Also Michael Sheen, Colin Thubron, Francis Fukuyama, Wayne McGregor, Sarah Raven, Angela Hartnell, Martin Wolf, Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker!), Richard E Grant, Tom Tugendhat, Phil Wang, Tom Dixon, Michael Gove and many more… You can even bring your dog along and enter him or her into a light-hearted contest for the festival’s top canine!

Unfitted Kitchen goes live up north

From early November there will be two UK showrooms displaying our Unfitted Kitchen range. Kitchens Etc in North Creake, Norfolk, have been showing the furniture for a couple of years and are about to install a new peninsula design – photo of it in production, above. The proportions of this work particularly well in squarer kitchens as its horseshoe shape does not protrude as much as a traditional peninsula, allowing for greater freedom of movement around it.

Kitchens Etc are shortly to be joined by Butler Interiors in Lower Bentham near Lancaster, where the Unfitted collection will include the innovative Butterfly Working Table. This sits in the centre of the room like an island but codes more as a table. Its surface is divided into three: a wooden section for food prep, a flush induction hob and a composite stone resting zone for pans and hot dishes. While the Butterfly Working Table comes up at the height of an island rather than a typical kitchen table, its design is open between the four legs, meaning there is no light-excluding bulk in the main part of the kitchen space. It incorporates three drawers below the countertop plus an open pot rack. The legs are hollow so as to invisibly house electric cabling for the hob. These surfaces are really easy to clean. The overall shape is neither square, round nor exactly rectangular: there is a narrowing in the central section that suggests the shape of a pair of butterfly wings while not being that exaggerated.

Butler Interiors will be displaying our circular walk-in pantry, the Frigidarium, the raised-height dishwasher and oven in a beautiful cabinet with original artwork, plus handmade tiles and natural finishes in paint and oil. There will also be an Ambient Dresser, Spice and Condiments Drum and a set of café tables.

The Unfitted Kitchen is not a new idea but a reinterpretation of all the work I’ve done since the 1980s. It brings a spirit of flexibility and adventure to planning a new kitchen, a luxury way of designing a well-furnished room that feels more like a living room than a cooking space. This is partly done by incorporating lots of eclectic detail, each item of furniture contributing its own subtly different ambiance, all coming together to create in layers a unique personalised kitchen.

Contact Johnny

How much stuff do you need?

I’ve been enjoying India Knight’s recent design book, Home: How to Love It, Live in It and Find Joy in It. These are considerations close to my heart. Knight gives domestic design an emotional focus and in particular she loves stuff – a home is not a home without plenty of it, she says. I do very much like an anti-minimalist message. Our things tell our stories. They weave together to make the fabric of our lives, Knight says and I agree. People worry too much about what their household objects might reveal about them, tidying them all away in case someone stands in judgment, and outsourcing the design of their homes to interior decorators rather than trusting themselves. Take back control is what I believe – celebrate what you like and who you are by having your things on display.

There is good guidance on kitchen design in Home. A big table is Knight’s recommendation. She also believes the kitchen should be decorated and presented like any other in the house rather than given the bland treatment. Lighting is a subject she gets right, making the claim that it is the most important thing in every room. ‘You can’t have only one source of light because the room will look flat, overlit, unwelcoming and dreadful – a particular disaster in a kitchen’, Knight says. She recommends the avoidance of ceiling lights unless there is no choice, opting instead for a variety of lighting sources including a table lamp on a worktop. Candles create intimacy – Knight has dinner by candlelight every night, even when she is by herself.

You can of course go too far with stuff. This summer I unearthed in my rammed library (also home to a lot of spiders) a slim volume with the title Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding, written by a formidable trio of highly qualified writers with a surfeit of letters after their names and a foreword by Patricia B Perkins, JD, Executive Director, Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation. Serious hoarding is no joke: it"s a psychological illness with sad origins. I flipped through the book, giving a thought to a relation with the disorder before dumping a dusty old stereo in the bin (my wife took it out and recycled it correctly). Next step might be decluttering the library by donating Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding to charity.

Fully-working research kitchen looking for a new home

A few years ago I took part in a fascinating research project run from Newcastle University and the National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA). It was led by Dr Peter Gore, whose aim was to develop a kitchen - pictured above - that would support people with extra physical and/or mental needs without looking or feeling at all institutional. This was to avoid any sense of incapacity that safety equipment and designs can give their users. Instead the Four Generational Kitchen would work for all types of users in beautiful, enviable style. I was brought in to provide non-superficial aesthetics while working with Peter and a team of technicians to incorporate my designs practically.

The result was a breakthrough kitchen that fulfilled specific functions while looking fabulous. It opened at the NICA centre in central Newcastle at the exact same time as the first Covid lockdown in 2020. It stood therefore in an empty space, more or less unvisited as one lockdown followed another that year. Sad and frustrating for its creators.

After an afterlife as a conference backdrop, this 4G kitchen is now looking for its forever home. We are offering it in its entirety, a working kitchen after some tweaks, at an unbelievably low price (on application). It would suit a school or similar institution as well a private home. It has these main elements:

• Central island with a rise-and-fall mechanism to accommodate users of different heights, including those sitting in a chair or wheelchair. The island incorporates an end-grain chopping block, Eurokera induction hob and two swing-out seats

• Long sink structure with sink on rise-and-fall mechanism: you can sit down while doing the washing up

• Extended-size plate rack with built-in lighting

• Brand new Panasonic oven in a rise-and-fall structure that is mounted to a wall to provide alterable-height oven access

• A long base counter with a standard full-size Electrolux fridge at one end and a large, curved cupboard that includes a warming cabinet at the other end, joined by a base unit

• Dishwasher in cabinet on wheels

• Artisanal tiles made by Alex Zdankowicz

If this is of interest do please email enquiries@johnnygrey.com

A big coffee boost

Here at my house and in the studio we are revelling in the difference really great coffee makes to the day. Our children upgraded from supermarket coffee a while ago while we unpretentiously held out. However something happened in the last month: we discovered Small Batch Coffee Roasters in Brighton by word of mouth and are blown away by how delicious their roasted beans are.

You can choose from a range of roasts, beans, grinds and methods of making this vital component of the day. Coffee is that miraculous thing, a treat that is truly good for you. It helps cognition among other things. It is mildly and I think harmlessly addictive.

We bought the stovetop grind in the Goldstone blend plus a selection of pods for the Nespresso machine for when we’re in a real hurry. This is wonderful coffee. Do give them a try.

I wish you all the best for a new season as the dry, scorching summer fades into hopefully damper conditions. Let’s enjoy the fruits of the harvest while we start hunkering down with longer evenings to spend in the kitchen.

Johnny