Hidden Kitchens
One interpretation of the post-culinary kitchen is a kitchen that completely vanishes when you don’t need it. Not a single appliance or even a utensil to disturb your perfect living space:
Living etc
There are definitely days when a big up-and-over door would be useful to hide the debris left by my culinary endeavors – this one appears to defy gravity:
Location Works
Then we have not only the up-and-over door, but also clever swiveling boxes to hide the counter top clutter – you just know that has been dreamt up by architects, don’t you:
Architects Adelaide Borniche and Nicola Marchi - Marie Claire Maison
Here the exotic wood panels hide almost everything except the island with its cooktop – but that little oven does become rather a stand-out:
Living etc
And here, at least when you’re seated, there’s little to see except a quiet wall of storage – and of course, the faucet:
Jean Pierre Lemoine via stylinrooms.de
Sliding doors are another way to hide all evidence that you actually cook in your kitchen – though once again, the faucet on the island does rather give the game away:
Joseph Dirand Architecture
What do you think? Have kitchens become so offensive that we need to hide them away like this? Although I do find a nice, big, deep sink very useful for stashing pots and pans that I haven’t been able to clean before serving, on the whole I think I prefer to celebrate food and its preparation rather than treating it like a guilty secret.
So true, Joseph – people are knocking down walls and opening up kitchens into great rooms, but even as we spend more time in or near the kitchen, less and less of it is actually about cooking. The post culinary kitchen is the most interesting room in the house – and probably the most challenging
I think the kitchen that is part of a larger Great Room—as opposed to being located in a separate room devoted only to cooking—is one of the slickest ideas now going about.
One of the things I find particularly interesting about kitchen design these days is the dichotomy now going on. On the one hand, because they are becoming more of a family gathering place, they are getting a lot more use, but as kitchens, in the old sense, they are getting very little use! People bring home take-out or frozen dinners of one type or another. Truthfully, the most used appliances in a lot of kitchens these days are the coffee pot and the microwave! Even so, people are beginning to consider the kitchen the heart of the home. But it’s a kitchen that is not your mama’s kitchen anymore—nor my mama’s kitchen.
The kitchen in the Montana home where I grew up was bare bones, because it was in a house that was built in the 1880s. The stove was free standing, and we had one counter with two small cupboards on either side of a window. Kitty corner to this was a double sink my father installed in a Formica countertop he made himself. That kitchen was used only for cooking, because it was not possible to do anything else in that room. But this was in the 1950s, and my father insisted on the family getting together for dinner every night, where we discussed what we did in school, events of the day, and sometimes, because he was a voracious reader, whatever history book my father may have been reading at the time.
Well, time marched on, and society went in a different direction. Nowadays kids wander about with every electronic device known to man, and families, in consequence, have fragmented. With all the evils of unrestricted use of the Internet by children, though, more and more people are insisting that computers be used only in the kitchen, which has led, in turn, to the family gathering there. But it means that the kitchen as gathering place has become more important than the kitchen as cooking place, and when space is limited, it means that there may not be as much room for other furniture in a room that was originally designed to be used as an “old style” kitchen only.
And that brings us back to the designs you’ve shared with us here, because they’re part of what is nothing less than a revolution in both kitchen designs and American lifestyles. Just looking at what you’ve shown here, it is apparent to me that their mission is nothing less than adapting their kitchens to the lifestyle of their clients while designing innovative concepts for every nook and cranny, the whole of which has a compactness that allows it to easily reside at one end of a Great Room that would be so much more than an oversized family room. It would be where family gathers, and nothing can be greater than that.
Hi Francois – yes, it does seem that these kitchens are too good to hide, doesn’t it? I’ve seen some that would easily improved by throwing a giant dust-sheet over them!
The irony is that these are large kitchens in large expensive houses. The place you really need to hide a kitchen to reuse a room for something else is in a tiny cheap flat – where you probably can’t afford this kind of design.