style with substance
recipe for success
These timeless design principles will help you cook up a working
kitchen that makes you happy—and won’t bust your budget.
Beyond its modern appliances, high-quality surfaces, and bold splashes of red and blue, this remodeled and expanded kitchen features elemental design principles like center stage placement of the stove and an island with room for family and friends to gather. The kitchen was designed by this column’s author, Vishu Magee, and remodeled by Jade Enterprises.
This article first appeared in Summer 2009 Su Casa
Of all places in the home, the kitchen is most driven by function. Living rooms are about comfort and bedrooms are about refuge, but the modern kitchen seems to be all about work. That certainly is the impression you get at some home supply stores, where kitchen design is a somewhat mechanical process of picking out appliances, working them into an efficient floor plan, and filling in a cabinet system and countertops that suit your preferences and your budget.
Appliances in particular tend to define the kitchen, and these days they are so dazzling it’s easy to overlook certain timeless and elemental principles that can make these beautiful tools work even better. What is more, these utterly simple design principles carry no price tag.
Mind you, I’m not talking about the famous kitchen triangle. Although it’s quite true that the sink, refrigerator, and range should each be within two or three steps from one another, a few decades of efficiency standards do not make for timelessness. To discover a truly timeless principle, you have to go back to prehistory: before the idea of “kitchen” even existed, our ancestors would gather around an open fire to cook their food, stay warm, and ward off predators. In time, fire became the center of ceremony and tribal councils. Fire is inseparable from who we are as social creatures.
In effect, home is where the hearth is, so the simple act of giving your kitchen range center stage can evoke a pattern hard-wired into human nature. It doesn’t matter a lot whether you’ve chosen a high-end or humble model: center-stage placement of the stove will enormously amp up the effectiveness of either.
I’ve specified “center stage” because a literal center placement will obviously not work in the modern context. But placing the stove so it is widely visible and so the cook can easily converse with family and guests comes pretty close. Even feng shui practitioners will love it because the cook can face everybody, rather than turn his or her back to the guests.
After stove placement, two other details help align kitchen design with universal patterns. The first is a configuration that accommodates several people, whether they’re chopping veggies or sipping chardonnay. This develops the kitchen as a social center. Central islands accomplish this in large kitchens, and a peninsula is definitely better than full-height partitions. At the very least, just having a little more open floor space is helpful.
The last timeless pattern simply calls for a comfortable place to eat: stools at an island are OK, but for my money you can’t beat an informal country kitchen with a full-on table and chairs, which say “home cooked” rather than “fine dining” or “diner,” as a formal dining room or stools at the island might. In a sense, it’s all about creating a working kitchen that feels like a family room.
These prescriptions may not all be attainable when remodeling, but you can probably capture one of them and allude to the others. It’s great if you can blow out the wall separating your kitchen and dining room and go for the country feel. But perhaps you’re stuck with an existing galley kitchen or a tight 12-by-12-foot room with partitions on all sides. At the very least, you can deck out the range with a contoured hood and tiled backsplash to evoke the feeling of centrality or “sacred hearth,” and you can create the illusion of space with the addition of a skylight.
Certainly many kitchen designers have intuitively leaned toward elemental design principles. But it helps to become conscious of these principles and extend them to the use of finishes, lighting, and even the selection of appliances and fixtures. Are the range and range hood going to blend in anonymously with the cabinets and other appliances? Or will stainless steel contrast with natural woodwork to provide the “pop” that accentuates the centrality of the range?
With these basics in place, a good kitchen designer will see to it that every single utensil and serving dish finds its place in an overall flow so logical a first-time house guest will know exactly where the flatware is stashed. The result is the marriage of style with substance.
Green building has given us a new set of design criteria, which in the kitchen has mostly to do with health. Water quality is high on the list: the old regimen of salt or potassium water softeners backed up by reverse osmosis is giving way to whole-house activated carbon filtration or point-of-use filters right at the tap. The rationale is that one should retain good minerals in the water while avoiding the harmful ones. Where hard water is an issue, conditioners such as those made by Environmental Water Systems (ewswater.com) include proprietary catalytic devices that leave hard minerals in the water but prevent them from precipitating on wine glasses, shower glass, and plumbing valves.
Ordinary ventilation partially satisfies green concerns about air quality, but the critical step is to reduce toxins coming from cabinetry, plastics, cleansers, paints, and sealers. Here we can turn to any number of natural materials perfect for Southwestern design: sandstone countertops, travertine tile, clay plaster, and flagstone or hardwood floors. Green products are constantly coming on the market, such as PaperStone, a countertop material that resembles soapstone but is made of compressed recycled paper and nonvolatile adhesives. Another such product for cabinet construction is wheat board, made from straw waste and formaldehyde-free glue. To maintain these finishes, you can choose from a wide array of cleansers and sealers that avoid VOCs (volatile organic compounds), phosphates, and other pollutants.
Practicing a green lifestyle usually includes recycling, which is made much easier by having a roll-out in the cabinet alongside your trash unit or a freestanding bin in an adjacent utility room. Composting kitchen scraps is also having a resurgence. I still rely on a basic Rubbermaid container and a daily trip to the compost heap, but others might find useful space-saving devices online at composters.com.
The perennial centerpiece of sustainable design is undoubtedly energy conservation, which in the kitchen begins with appliances earning the highest Energy Star rating. Compact fluorescent light bulbs, while pricey, are effortless to install and offer a great payback. You can truly transform your kitchen with a thermally efficient Solatube or Sun Tunnel for daylighting. But frankly, the biggest energy savings may come not from those devices but from you: limiting your use of water (especially hot water), turning off lights you don’t need, turning the burner down to a low flame, and using short dishwasher cycles. Once you’ve designed a green kitchen, you need to be green yourself!
Kitchen design is a work in progress. If we turn to timeless design principles while embracing green technology, it’s no exaggeration to say that we are redefining the kitchen once again.
Vishu Magee is a home designer from Taos who specializes in blending green-building solutions with traditional New Mexico architecture. Contact him at archetype-design.com.