KITCHEN LAYOUTS

In last week’s post we looked at the idea of applying the kitchen triangle in designing a kitchen, but noted that, while still a useful idea, developments in kitchen design in the 70 or so years since the concept was introduced have complicated things somewhat. In this week’s post we will examine some of these developments, and look at the influence they have had on kitchen design.

Perhaps the biggest change has been that the kitchen has taken centre stage in the social life of the house. With the rise of the informal Living-Dining-Kitchen plan, the importance of the kitchen within this open space has only grown, and so has its size. Often a central consideration in kitchen design is laying out the ‘stations’ of the space in a way that allows social interaction between the person or people doing the cooking and other family members ‘hanging out’ in the space.

One consequence of kitchens getting larger is that the idea of a kitchen triangle is not always applicable. Whereas in the past the kitchen was more or less exclusively the domain of the housewife or even a paid cook, in many modern households there may be multiple people involved in food preparation, and if this is the case the kitchen has to accommodate them - often by dividing the space up into two or more zones, with separate areas for food preparation and/or socialising. The single-wall kitchen, the L-shaped ‘corner’ kitchen, and the U-shaped or C-shaped layouts, though efficient in their use of space for smaller kitchens, are not always amenable to use by multiple people, or to socialising. One way around this is to include a breakfast counter ‘peninsula’ as one leg of the L or U, with high chairs or stools, so people have a place to sit and talk with the person preparing meals/washing up etc.

The gold standard for a ‘social’ kitchen within a larger open plan space is the kitchen island. The island serves as both preparation area and entertainment area, and can be added to a single-wall kitchen to form a ‘galley’ kitchen, or to a corner kitchen. In both cases, the kitchen island opens up the possibilities for using the kitchen socially, by reorienting the space towards the living area, but if space is limited the kitchen island may not be a practical possibility - although you can get away with as little as 1.0m clear distance between your kitchen counters and kitchen island in a single-person kitchen, you need at least 1.2m if the kitchen is to be used by two people at once - enough for them to ‘sidle’ past each other - and at least 1.5m to allow people to pass each other without going sideways.

THE KITCHEN TRIANGLE

The kitchen triangle or kitchen work triangle is a simple rule of thumb useful in kitchen design, first developed by ergonomists in the mid 20th century, who wanted a way of measuring and maximising efficiency of movement (and thus minimising space and thus cost) between the three main centres or ‘stations’ of activity in the kitchen: food storage (the fridge and pantry), food preparation (the sink) and food cooking (the stove/oven). Generally the sink, the most used part of the kitchen, should be in the centre of the arrangement, i.e. between the other two stations. The idea is that if you draw a triangle with one of these three stations at each of its three corners, then the total length of the sides of the triangle should be between four to six metres (some sources cite five to seven metres or other figures). At any rate, anything less than the lower figure probably means your kitchen will be too cramped; and anything higher might suggest that your kitchen is probably going to be too large and you will be spending too much time and effort walking between the three stations.

The kitchen triangle is also useful in making sure that no pedestrian traffic crosses any part of the working space of the kitchen- people going through the kitchen to bedrooms, laundry, etc. should not have to cross paths with or dance around a person using the kitchen. Also, the lines of movement and sight between stations should ideally not be ‘broken up’ with tall cabinets, wall ovens, and the like- there should be open countertop between each station.

As a general rule of thumb, the kitchen triangle is still a valid way of evaluating the basic functionality of your kitchen, even seventy odd years after the concept was first introduced. Of course, each design situation and brief is unique, the kitchen triangle is not appropriate for all kitchens, and these days things like kitchen islands can complicate matters- next week we will look at some of these factors in more detail.

DESIGN CONDESCENSION

From time to time I come across articles on interior design blogs or in other places where the writer traces the development of a particular aspect of architectural or interior design through its history. In these articles, there is often a faint undercurrent of condescension or superiority, as if to say, ‘haha look at those silly premoderns, luckily we moderns know better.’ This attitude is driven by an underlying assumption of inevitable and endless progress, be it social, material or technological, that confers redundancy on everything that came before the present.

A good example of this is kitchen design. The author will sketch out the history of kitchens, comparing the separated and poky little lean-to kitchens of the nineteenth century unfavourably to the modern ‘open plan’ that is ubiquitous today, and imply bafflement that anybody would have chosen to do it any way other than we do. As an aside, it is stating the obvious to point out that between the two ends of this kitchen design spectrum there are all kinds of in-between ‘semi-open’ design possibilities that allow the best of both worlds, but for whatever reason these possibilities are rarely explored; nor in any case are the eminently rational motives behind the design decisions buried in these old and ‘primitive’ kitchens.

Before electricity and even gas, all cooking was done with wood or coal, and the risk of fire was very real. By separating the kitchen off the back of the house, the risk of a kitchen fire taking out the entire house was reduced, particularly in the case of a brick house where the lean-to kitchen was effectively fire-separated from the main dwelling. Cooking fires also generate a lot of heat, which isn’t necessarily wanted in the rest of the house, especially in an Australian summer.

No electricity also means no mechanical extraction fans, so a separate kitchen was the only way of preventing smoke, soot, oil, cooking smells, and water vapour from permeating the walls and furnishings of living areas.

These are only some of the ‘technical’ reasons for kitchens being the way they were; there are also social factors that I won’t go into here. The point is that the design decisions of past buildings shouldn’t be dismissed as historical or superannuated, but rather taken seriously and even learnt from.

Design, like evolution, has no telos; design features, like the features of biological organisms, simply represent the fittest or best responses to the prevailing conditions of the environment in which they exist. If, as I believe, we are leaving our historically anomalous environment of extreme energy and resource abundance, and re-entering an environment of energy and resource scarcity that is almost beyond living memory in the first world, then we will also witness a reversal of the design ‘progress’ seen by techno-progressives as irreversible, and the re-emergence of many of the design elements, and much of the design wisdom, contained in old kitchens and other spaces.