The Beating Heart of Every Home
Think back in your life to special moments, holidays, birthdays, celebrations, reunions, moments of profound laughter, meaningful glimpses of your life. Most likely, the kitchen was somewhere nearby.
A kitchen is one of the most dynamic and complex spaces in any home. How many other rooms have as many fluid-management systems or heavy equipment fixtures that must function at high temperatures and low temperatures with extreme liability and excessive visual appeal. How many other rooms host so many people, so much work and so much creativity in any day? It’s an art studio, a therapist's office, a work camp and a day spa rolled into a relatively compressed ratio of square footage. In the kitchen, beauty and function dance to the most complex arias, and when the dance is done well, it breeds a bit of, well, magic.
Knowing the Fundamentals
The best and most beautiful kitchens all have one trait in common, an underlying layout principle. One of the most classic methods for designing a kitchen is called the “Work Triangle” a design to minimize steps inside one of the most productive spaces in a home. This is a term that’s about as common as the word “paper” in the design and construction industries, but it still mystifies the majority of end-users. It functions as the backbone, the foundation that sets the common language of all kitchen spaces; a well-managed work triangle is what makes a kitchen a delight to inhabit as much as look at. For most of us, it’s nearly invisible until it’s pointed out. The fundamentals establish the posture of the kitchen itself.
This simple geometry serves to create efficient workspaces with clear traffic lanes that reduce any clutter in movement to the users. There is a method to creating space where people can coexist without bumping into each other. Imagine a triangle that connected your cooktop, your sink, and the refrigerator. This is the work triangle. Each leg of the triangle is between four and nine feet long, which means you’re never more than a few steps from any of these anchor appliances. In-turn, they each act as a “hub” for other related storage compartments and anchor the independent kitchen work zones. This is the map that guides the creation of a kitchen, but like any good frame, it invites more layers and upholds them with strength.
Today, the basic work triangle has evolved as U-shaped, open concept and line kitchens are being designed. The list of modern appliances is growing too, wine fridges, ice, drawers, sous vide systems, hefty coffee makers, steam systems, and speed ovens all need to find their home in the fundamental structure of the space, so the triangle is being modified into new geometries. When the concept of the triangle caves too much to it’s adjacencies, we shift to thinking more about what we need around us to do the most frequent tasks in the kitchen. An adjacent-forward mindset means that the trash can is never too far from the sink, and the pots never stored too far from the stove. The goal is always to make the design more efficient which means we remain flexible toward the guiding principle that better suits the particular user scenario. But the point remains that we begin looking from the baseline fundamentals of that work triangle, from the timeless utility of a kitchen. It’s hard to begin a journey in design without a firm starting point that acknowledges the purpose of a space first. Reducing tripping hazards and steps taken is considered as much as the marble countertop that’s chosen.
Design for all Senses
Much of design is absorbed through the eyes, seemingly, but the kitchen is a far more sensorily inviting place. We engage kitchens through our hands, our noses, and our tongues. What the eye inherits invokes a whole host of associations through those other senses. When a kitchen is being designed, it needs to “feel”, literally, like the home you are trying to design. Take the simple and humble sink. When you go to wash your hands, are you greeted by heavy iron handles with weight and the patina of a thousand dinners? Or does it feel sleek, delicate, modern, refined, like something you want to polish as soon as you’ve touched it. These small cues create the whole vision of the design, and when we look at a picture of a beautiful kitchen, our bodies begin to infill these small aspects of the experience we dream of having in that space. The imagination is fueled by those details that may first appear benign.
The kitchen is the heartbeat of the home because this is where we all gather at once and it’s the only space in the home where we can invoke all of our senses simultaneously. The word “kitchen” sparks a scene in each of our minds, mostly people, mostly a moment, and a few elements of the design. We’ve all experienced something like this:
I remember from childhood, the smell of an ancient German gravy recipe steaming up from an old stainless pot lid on the slate farmhouse countertop. Big bottles of heavy and rich wine sitting behind crosshatched Baccarat stemware. The table wasn’t long enough to seat twelve people, so it was angled in the openly adjacent dining room, and the kitchen breakfast table bumped up next to it with a tablecloth draped to hide the awkward union. Black windsor chairs played an out of tune fiddling noise as they slid in and out on the wood-floor that creaked as everyone walked and hugged and greeted one another. The sun, and the green of that day streamed in through three walls of windows. A day to be thankful for.
That’s one person, one moment in time. Every kitchen is a stage that must be set with intention, thoughtful design can be poignant in creating the magic of the moment. What do you remember?
Modern Kitchen Theories
When memories become a consideration in design, we have the opportunity to think more expansively. Classic design is “timeless” and we steer constantly toward furnishings and accents that fall outside the fads. We can avoid those caveat memories such as, “Oh and remember the shag carpet, it was awful!”. Consider going into a historic home and loving the colors and textures of yesterday’s century. Rich indigo linen was beautiful in 1878, it’s beautiful to this day. Heavy walnut and other natural woods with beeswax finishes were a style then, and these materials still form the basis for excellent modern furnishings. Yesteryear gave us more beauty that we give it credit for, not everything was shag carpet. There are just some things that will never go out of style.
We’re not exclusive to this ideology, but it’s authentic to who we are, and core to the way we design for people. If we can choose something universally beautiful, we are designing for great stories. With today’s level of expense, high quality needs to look relevant for decades, not days. As this relates to kitchens, it points us toward minimizing the “view” of modern appliances and other gadgety items. We design with very little technology on the countertops, and pantries and cupboards are tucked out of sight near refrigerators that have been customized to match the cabinetry. A ten-year-old kitchen feels brand new, timeless, when you can’t tell which generation of appliance package was used.
Because we create spaces that reflect who you are, Sometimes we really celebrate the modern design and promote the visually sparkling finishes and celebrate the screens on a new appliance package. Oftentimes, these anchors of the work triangle can be promoted to center stage and celebrated! You walk in and everything feels new, fresh, untouched! What a sensation! But it needs to reflect the person who lives there.
Today, there are so many ingredients (pun intended) that can be applied to a kitchen space. So many opportunities to make it speak for itself, to come in tandem with those elements that make it a highly functioning, beautiful space specific to its user. There is magic that can be created in combining countertops, lighting, hardware, appliances, plumbing fixtures, tiles, home automation, views and so many other things that sparkle and, today more than ever, look beautiful. Someone like an at-home barista has the chance to bring the coffee-bar to the home in such elegant and grand style with machinery and surfaces that surprise and delight. Today's world makes this so accessible.
Substance
Every kitchen build or renovation begins and ends with the people who will be using it. Exaggerated examples appear in the ever-inspiring international food scene, with chefs designing kitchens that express their creativity in form and in function. If you’ve eaten at any highly rated new restaurant, you’ve experienced proximity to a kitchen that is leading the practice of kitchen-making. Today’s commercial kitchen is a studio for creativity that doubles as a factory for food production. It’s all the extremes of what a kitchen means packed into one place and they are fast becoming influential on in-home spaces.
Whether large or small, new or old, when a kitchen is being created or re-touched it has to come into alignment with the heartbeat of the users. Is it a dynamic description of what they value and the moments they want to create? Does it make you want to sit and talk, or is it an intentional buffer of granite to create distance and privacy? Is it all about the food, or are there other stories at play, like a bar or a library of cookbooks? Just begin to imagine all the nuances of your own personality, then imagine expressing those habits and quirks in a three-dimensional space and you’ll soon realize that only one kitchen will do for you. Only a few designs will tell your story and truly reflect who you are.
So when you dream, dream your own dream.
We watch clients move with rapid agility from one design language to the next. It’s easy to fall in love with a hundred kitchens, a kitchen is a lovely place, no matter the style! But the beauty and process of design is steeped in the art of getting to know people and listening to the story that their life tells. We need to know the memories that have been influential, to hear the clang of the dishes and the smell of your favorite home-cooked meal. And while your kitchen in the real world will have hints of all those you’ve envied in magazines, it’s still something to fall in love with. It becomes the heart of the home, beating a distinguished rhythm that’s yours and no one else’s. When this happens, it’s something very special. A thrill, a love. And when the light dims low, and you and yours venture out on the deck to take your first bites, it’ll be there, still glowing beautifully, still the scene of those keepsake memories that define the place in which our life is lived.
*These writings are a collaborative effort between Slaughter Design Studio, and Ben Rodgers Pivotol. We do the designing and thinking, they capture it in words and “essence” so we can share it with you!