Kitchen Essential

How can one find a balance between innovation and continuity?. The danger of concentrating too much on innovation is choosing new elements that don’t go beyond the fashionable. Fashion in clothes is a useful source of self-renewal and since clothes may only have a relatively short life, it is not an absolute disaster if you become tired of them or they quickly appear dated. Furniture operates on a different timescale, and is connected with a sense of permanence. Both its physical nature and its price call for longevity. You are going to have to co-habit with it for a good many years. Your ideas, lifestyle and the demands may alter, but your furniture will not. So designing and choosing it requires careful thought and needs to take its long life into account.

One obvious way of doing this is by emphasizing and building in high quality craftsmanship. Good craftsmanship endures the test of time and continues to give pleasure even when fashions or aesthetic values change. It also ensures that the furniture will be respected and looked after. (Around 95 per cent of all Rolls-Royce motor cars ever built are still in working order, so I understand. Their quality of manufacture gives an aura that ensures they are well looked after and maintained, as well as retaining their financial value.) Any carefully made, complex piece of craftsmanship bears evidence of the skills and efforts of the maker, and the quality of materials, when combined with good design, provides a beauty and sense of completeness that creates a kind of protective field.

For a balanced design, both new ideas and old should be happily juxtaposed. The new ideas are drawn from contemporary influences, and embrace such elements as current aspects of function, choice of materials, environmental issues, new developments in technology in terms of both manufacturing and materials, and pushing the boundaries out of new aesthetic attitudes or intellectual movements such as minimalism, postmodernism, or de-constructivism.

At present there is an unprecedented climate of tolerance to the mixing and choice of styles and references. It is an exciting time to be either creating or commissioning new work. The limitations are in the over- acceptance of stereotypes such as ‘country-style’ and other ‘labels’ that limit our vision unnecessarily. By mixing metaphors and historical connections the new is developed. What has to be avoided is looking too closely over our shoulders to copy what others are doing. Innovation means newness and independence from what already exists. Newness in itself does not necessarily guarantee being better than traditional solutions. Sometime seeking a purely new solution can be pretentious, unnecessary or plain silly. Fashionable clothes with absurd add-ons, trivial accessories or peculiar cuts, suggest to me a short shelf life as far as user satisfaction is concerned and make one long for a more traditional design. The other side of the coin is continuity.

There are wonderful traditions in furniture-making, and in building design. Through varying them, the use of irony for example in employing mouldings but altering their scale, or by taking a traditional piece of furniture like a dresser and giving it a new specific kitchen task like pastry- making (as illustrated in this kitchen) freshness can be given to the design. Using unusual or contrasting colours on what is otherwise a traditional piece of furniture has a similar effect.

The kitchen I designed for these clients was built in 1981, and has stood the test of time well. Although twelve years or so have elapsed and my own design ideas have developed, the client tells me she is still as happy with it as when it was first installed. In planning terms it was ahead of its time — it was designed as a sitting room, dining room and food preparation area all rolled into one, and more formal than the traditional farmhouse kitchen, its antecedent. It had one major extra function: it was to be used as a small private cookery school for specialist cooking courses. Today it is still in use as such. The main requirement was a central island suitable for demonstrations and collective cooking. The planning followed traditional lines with most of the furniture free-standing. The pastry dresser and the sink cabinet are both conceived as individual pieces.

In the dining area the storage is provided by corner cupboards. The drum table, originally designed with my aunt Elizabeth David in mind, is more akin to a dining than a kitchen table. The centre-piece of the room is the fireplace and its companion, the Franklin stove. This is flanked by freestanding cupboards which house the television and stereo equipment. The screen between the two spaces creates a gentle ambiguity; is it really one large space or two separate ones?. It helps to reduce the exposure of the kitchen to the ’soft’ and dining areas. At one point my client’s husband wanted folding doors which I nervously talked him out of. Today he’s happy about this and we are the best of friends.

As far as my view of the kitchen is concerned, I almost see it as a piece of history, but am comfortable with the design. I find the red lacquer handles, fashionable at that time, something I might now want to change and perhaps I would use a little less of the olive ash which is on every piece of furniture. I’m not sure my client would agree. She likes it the way it is and briefed me clearly at the time as to the kind of kitchen she wanted. A good patron always ends up with a good job. They go hand in hand.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Kitchen Fashion versus Continuity

• Essential Kitchen Cutlery Part 5
• Discipline in the Kitchen Design Process
• THE ABC OF COOKWARE Part 1
• Spice up your Kitchen with Colour (Compact & Rero)
• Lighting Cupboards
• The Modern Farmhouse Kitchen
• Kitchen Spaces
• Spice up your Kitchen with Colour (Seaside Chic, Contemporary,Provencal Country & Industrial)
• Cheerful country living
• Table-Cloths and Napkins

Trackback URI | Comments RSS