The Case For The Closed Kitchen

Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell makes a case for rooms; We concentrate on one of them.

Kate Wagner is best known for her @mcmansionhell sideline, at its best this week with her dissection of Betsy DeVos’s summer house. Now, writing at CityLab, she makes The Case for Rooms, saying it’s time to end the tyranny of open-concept interior design. She addresses the kitchen in particular, a subject dear to this TreeHugger’s heart, and unlike just about everyone else in the world (including most TreeHugger readers) agrees with me that kitchens should be closed, not open.

One of the reasons I have disliked open kitchens is that they don’t really work the way people live and eat today. There are a few people around for whom cooking is a performance, but for most, it is a matter of different members of the family using small appliances, which are proliferating, and need a place to hide.

That’s why developers are now providing what developer Taylor Morrison called the “messy kitchen” in addition to the big fancy open kitchen; I described it on MNN:

Wagner thinks that the messy kitchen “offers hope for a transitional period where open spaces may become closed again.” I believe she is right, that the reality of how we live is actually sinking in. She writes that technological changes made the open kitchen possible:

Wolf/ There is no way that range hood is going to anything. /Promo image

Wagner also includes many of the reasons I have promoted closed kitchens; it is actually more efficient for cooking because the distances are shorter. Smells are contained. (Kitchen ventilation is, as I have noted, a huge problem, particularly in modern, tightly sealed energy efficient homes.) Being an acoustics expert, of course she notes:

Scan from Light, Air and Openness/Public Domain

However, I think Wagner is missing some of the key reasons that the open kitchen developed, and why I believe it should die. As Paul Overy wrote in his book Light Air and Openness, kitchens used to be multifunction spaces in working class homes. When the hygiene movement took root after the First World War, it was thought that kitchens should be more like hospital rooms than living spaces. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen accordingly; Overy writes:

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen 1926/CC BY 2.0

It was consciously designed to be too small to eat in, “therefore eliminating the unpleasant effects produced by smell, vapours and above all the psychological effects of seeing leftovers, plates, bowls, washing-up clothes and other items lying around.”

But it was also designed to free women from the drudgery of the kitchen.

Xray-delta/CC BY 2.0

The American kitchen of the fifties was the direct antithesis; after being part of the work force during the Second World War, women had to return to domestic duties so that the men could have their jobs back. I wrote:

James Vaughan on Flickr/CC BY 2.0

In the fifties and sixties, the kitchen was all about putting women in their place- room to make the food while looking after children. Today, most of the time, the kitchen isn’t even functioning as a kitchen- according to research, less than 60 percent of American meals are actually made at home, only 24 percent of meals are made from scratch, and 42 percent of meals are eaten alone. But the average fridge is opened 40 times per day; the kitchen is just a grazing pasture now. As I have written:

I have also written that “the kitchen becomes an exhibit demonstrating how much money the working man and woman have, a place to put on a show on weekends, often by the man who likes the showy stuff.” I concluded in one post:

You do not want to read the comments that this generated, where I get called a lot of nasty things. But I stand by my my basic thesis: The open kitchen has always been a bad idea, from a thermal, practical, health and even social point of view, and now as Kate Wagner points out, because of acoustics too. As she concludes: “Sometimes, true freedom means putting up a few barriers.”