Kitchen Essential

The English have a long tradition of follies. Perhaps our love of eccentricity is partly responsible. The Gothic style is at its heart. It has had as many revivals as centuries and many disguises too, secular and ecclesiastical. In the nineteenth century there was a strong connection between privacy and Gothic. The newly rich industrialists built themselves mansions or pseudo castles fortified in the Gothic style. The phrase the Englishman’s house is his castle suggests the strong sense of security derived from Gothic, since that is how castles are perceived in our imagination.

During the nineteenth century there was an obsessive desire to cover walls with decorative paintings, photographs and knick-knacks of every description. This was an expression of the need to fill personal space with real or imagined experience and is part of making oneself comfortable. One reason, according to Robert Harbison in Eccentric Spaces, is ‘the self which wants to convert its feelings for being embattled to literal fortifications’. Perhaps the regular revival of interest in Gothic is relevant today for the same reason. We want to keep the world of pollution, wars and hunger at bay. It is part of the function of the home to be a retreat or nest. Folly or comfort, for whatever reason a Gothic kitchen is chosen, it is crazy — but fun too! And surely the enjoyment of your home and the process of creating it should be pleasurable and light-hearted. If it has historical associations at the same time, it answers another need, connection to the past — a decently ancient past in the case of Gothic.

The origins go back to twelfth-century France, although the pointed arch itself can be traced back to Mesopotamia. Its use became widespread because of the superior structural strength of its vaulting. By the nineteenth century when religion dominated social values, Gothic had gained a domestic use. The medieval castle with its towers and battlements became amalgamated in the public mind with ecclesiastical Gothic developing the perfect model for a ‘fantasy’ style of architecture. Today a Gothic arch remains a powerful symbol, immediately evoking the past, perhaps even a slightly spooky one because of its use in historical films.

The use of Gothic is part of a search for authenticity or assumed `historical‘ comfort and so is more potent than most other revivals favoured at present because of its ecclesiastical associations. There is a drawback though in the tendency, especially in the English variety, to be sombre and heavy. This can be remedied by using colour, lightweight mouldings, a mixture of horizontal and vertical planes, and the element of surprise. The unexpected will always give amusement, but if it is carried out with a skill so that some aspect provides a quality of permanence, for example through complex or testing craftsmanship, then it goes beyond the ephemeral and will endure.

As it happens, my first kitchen was designed in Gothic and although every piece of furniture was made from a different style of Gothic, there was a clear family resemblance. It was an exercise in artifice. However in the kitchen illustrated here, the existing architecture of the room was so clearly to be respected that Gothic seemed the natural starting point. As the idea was to use the majority of the space as a sitting room and library, so the plan evolved of a galley kitchen in which two towers house appliances such as a tall refrigerator and dishwasher on the inside and the dreaded television on the library side. Inside the kitchen every square inch has been accounted for, making maximum use of the restricted but convenient compactness of the kitchen area.

It remains a peculiar feature of Gothic that almost every domestic style of architecture has at some time been `Gothicized’. In that first kitchen of mine, known as ‘Sam’s’ kitchen, French ecclesiastical Gothic rubbed shoulders with eighteenth-century Chinoiserie Gothic, nineteenth- century Gothic, early Georgian Gothic and Islamic tracery which goes back to its use in Syria at the time of the Crusades. Sam’s kitchen was installed in 1976 at one of the darkest periods of English domestic design. The only kitchens available were made of melamine or Formica in factory-made units. They were so dull, unimaginative and uniform I wanted to send a message out that there was an alternative. The prevailing Modern Movement ethos at the time forbade ornament, historical connections of any sort and evidence of any hand-made traditional craft skills. Gothic seemed a perfect sort of defiance and act of rebellion against the then current restrictive practices. Whatever else, it certainly inspired a great deal of discussion both at dinner parties in the kitchen and newspaper columns outside it.

Thankfully today the prevailing intellectual climate is less dogmatic and more tolerant to a wide range of different styles. References to past periods are acceptable and restoration is no longer a dirty word. In some ways Gothic, the language of eccentricity for many years, is now that of good taste. Gothic has finally come home and has been made ‘comfortable’ to live with.

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