Why Do We Want Our Kitchens Back?

Why Do We Want Our Kitchens Back?
By William MacDonald

Design and Styling, William MacDonald
Photo, Nicola Betts

For so long many of us have lived in the purgatory that is the open concept kitchen. It’s endless views of the rest of the house, it’s awkward openness, it useless spaces with hideous windows impossible to cover with any drapery treatment known to man. And the worst of all, still never enough cupboard space!

I once attended a formal dinner party in an open concept kitchen/ family room/ dinning room/ entrance hall/craft room. Now formal and craft room may sound like an oxymoron, that’s because it is one. I was seated next to a young lady in her early twenties who held her knife like a pen and her fork like a hatchet. I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed a little overwhelmed so being the accomplished dinner companion that I am I had tried to initiate light banter, asking her the basics, do you live in town? Do you like to cook? etc….She answered my questions with minimal displacement of her jaw and lobbed no inquiries in my direction (I found out later that she works in public relations). With table chat at a minimum I surveyed, the dining room, the dining room? I wasn’t actually sure where I was. Am I in the kitchen or the entrance hall? No… I think that glitter on my shoe means I am definitely in the craft room. Perhaps my dinner companion’s unease stemmed from a similar confusion? I doubt it.

From where I sat I began to notice to the recent scars suffered by the kitchen due to dinners preparation. The finite splatters of béarnaise up the cupboard fronts and the burnt saucepan propped up against the flat screen t.v. Then after dinner, the recently cleared plates piling up on the counter. Yum! I thought to myself what has happened to all of the walls? Where have they gone? Why do we live like this? All these questions began pulsing through my mind like a taser on a beach at spring break. I began asking friends, colleagues and clients how they felt about this open concept kitchen world we had created. Those who had not lived it…loved it. Those who had torn down walls were planning to put them up again. And those who claimed to love it did so I think because they had no choice.

I have never been a big fan of open concept kitchens having grown up in a house and time, not too long ago, when the home and family had more structure, co-incidence? The kitchen, with all its walls, was the heart of the house where meals were cooked and eaten at a table with a multitude of family and friends void of all external distractions, only each others company and food to amuse us. The living room, as my father would roar when he found an empty plate, was for “living” not for eating.

This rather traditional concept may seem a little old-fashioned or as a recent correspondent indicated to me “Completely idiotic, out-of-step with how we live today you moron”. If this notion is out of step then why are so many walls going back up between kitchens and the rest of the house? I am seeing this in my work more and more. Why do new builds offer, “separate kitchens”? Why do we want our kitchens back?

So far I have come up with the following,

• We want them back because we lost them a little while ago. Lost them to media, to mudrooms, to tub chairs and big screens, to vertical blinds and horizontal minds that cook with a telephone and eat without taste.

• We want them back because we’ve created a generation who don’t know how to hold a knife or fork properly and who are ill at ease when at a dinner table. And who sadly know nothing about cooking and the joy it can bring to one’s life.

• We want our kitchens back because recent events may have encouraged us to look inside our homes and ourselves in the hopes that we may find that cozy room from our past where families and friends came together to cook, talk, eat, plan, laugh and enjoy life without the bells and whistles and pod’s of now.

I’m not naïve. I know that open concept kitchens will be around for a long time, perhaps forever. But within this purgatorial vastness I would like to see more cooking, than ordering more talking than gaming, more table than counter, more cozy than cathedral and definitely the most important thing of all more cupboard space.