- Problem: Cooking is uncomfortable if the kitchen counter is too short and also if it is too long.
- Therefore: To strike a balance between the kitchen which is too small, and the kitchen which is too spread out, place the stove, sink, and food storage and counter in such a way that:
- No two of the four are more than 10 feet apart.
- The total length of the counter — excluding sink, stove, and refrigerator — is at least 12 feet.
- No one section of the counter is less than 4 feet long.
- In our home: The folks at Pedini who helped us design our kitchen emphasized the importance of functionality in kitchen design, and their guidance is consistent with this pattern. A back counter runs parallel to an island. This gives plenty of counter space. The stove is on the island and offset from the sink and chopping station on the back counter. The fridge and oven are on the wall that runs perpendicular to the island and counter (floor plan). Overall, this has resulted in a kitchen that is compact without being crowded.Having spent nearly five years with a spacious U-shaped kitchen and having only lived with galley style kitchens in apartments, we worried we would be unhappy with the layout. Seeing the kitchens in the other houses reduced that concern, but it was not until we started using this kitchen every day that we were converted. A galley kitchen that’s open at both ends and wide enough for two people to work comfortably without obstructing the walk way is quite efficient.
We did worry at first that four feet between the island and back counter was not enough, but we have found that it is plenty for passing each other. Since the workstations are not back to back, people can even walk through the kitchen while we are both working in it, although it may require some weaving. Overall, we are quite happy with the convenience and functionality of our kitchen layout.
Story time! A custom built house will rarely be done on time. Like software engineers (and probably most other professions), builders tend to estimate based on expected case timing, not worst case timing. For the first two houses in our neighborhood, the final delay was the design and installation of the stairs. We wanted our home to be different. We assumed it would be delayed, but we didn’t want it to be the stairs that delayed move in. In this, we found success!
Detailed kitchen design comes early because it affects electrical and plumbing. We designed the kitchen before submitting construction permits, and we ordered it two months into construction. The cabinets required a large lead time because Pedini manufactures their kitchens in Italy and ships them to the US.
A December order provided sufficient lead time for an end of April delivery. By March, our project was a bit behind schedule, so we had Pedini hold the kitchen a bit longer so it would arrive at the end of May. This was, perhaps, our vital mistake.
Fast forward to May. No kitchen. June, still not here. July, still missing. The only detail our builder learned from Pedini was that a labor strike had delayed the kitchen in Panama. As best we can tell, the kitchen was lost during that time. In August we finally got a new shipping manifest indicating that the cabinets were to ship out of Italy (again) in mid-August to New Jersey and then shipped across the US — no going through Panama this time.
Four months after we originally wanted it, the kitchen arrived in mid-September, and installation started soon after. By the end of the month, the cabinets were installed. This unblocked installing the appliances and ordering and installing the counters. In the end, the kitchen was done less than a week before we moved in. Packing boxes and hiring movers when you don’t even have counters installed was uncomfortably exciting, but it all worked out in the end.
Onward to the kitchen itself! You can read about our design (post 1, post 2) and our appliances in earlier blog posts. In this post, we want to focus on how our decisions worked out (and share pretty pictures, of course).
- Problem: Rooms which are too closed prevent the natural flow of social occasions, and the natural process of transition from one social moment to another. And rooms which are too open will not support the differentiation of events which social life requires.
- Therefore: Adjust the walls, openings, and windows in each indoor space until you reach the right balance between open, flowing space and closed cell-like space. Do not take it for granted that each space is a room; nor, on the other hand, that all spaces must flow into each other. The right balance will always lie between these extremes: no one room entirely enclosed; and no space totally connected to another. Use combinations of columns, half-open walls, porches, indoor windows, sliding doors, low sills, french doors, sitting walls, and so on, to hit the right balance.
- In our home: In an open floor plan, differentiation between spaces can be difficult. This is especially important for the kitchen. The functionality of a kitchen can be hindered if it is too open to traffic, but if it is too shut off, then the people in the kitchen feel isolated. In our home, we use the island as a functional “wall” between the kitchen and the dining room. This defines the space as distinctly separate while still allowing interaction between the kitchen, dining room, and living room.
We are incredibly pleased with how the kitchen turned out. The discussion with the patterns covers the high level features. Now we’ll spend some time on the details.
We love the induction stove. It’s easy to control, easy to clean, and heats pans quickly. We probably would have been just as happy with a gas stove, but now that we’re used to induction, it would be difficult to switch. Our favorite feature is probably the per-burner timer that allows us to set a timer on a particular burner. When the timer runs out, the burner turns off. This is perfect when using the pressure cooker.
- Problem: Cupboards that are too deep waste valuable space, and it always seems that what you want is behind something else.
- Therefore: Cover the walls with narrow shelves of varying depth but always shallow enough so that things can be placed on them one deep — nothing hiding behind anything else.
- In our home: The main area where this pattern inspired us is the pantry. Because of the constraints of the elfa system, we pretty much ignored the advice about shelf depth. In practice, we have found that moderately deep shelves (12″ or 16″, mostly) work well when they are fairly low and ample enough to keep things from being crowded. Shelf depth aside, we love having open shelving in the pantry. Everything is visible and accessible. There’s no remembering where things are and digging through a cupboard. It’s lovely.
Between all of the cupboards and the huge pantry, we have plenty of storage space. After our previous super-tiny kitchen — where we had to store some of our kitchen gear upstairs in a closet despite having put half of it into storage — the storage here feels endless. We’re trying not to fill it up too quickly.
Jeff’s favorite small feature may be the bi-fold cabinet doors — they get out of the way and look really cool. Erika’s favorite small feature is a wire shelf that mounts under the sink and provides a place to hide away all of the ugly necessities of a sink.
The kitchen isn’t perfect, but the problems that actively bug us are small. One example is the appliances. Despite the refrigerator, oven, and microwave all being in the same 800 series from Bosch, they have completely different user interfaces — both functionally and aesthetically. It drives Erika crazy! One particularly silly example is that when the microwave is being used as a small convection stove, you can only enter minutes on the timer. The timer on the full sized stove requires you to enter seconds every single time you use it. Why, oh why do we need to enter seconds when using the oven?! And why is the oven mode on the microwave different?!
Small rants aside, we are really enjoying the kitchen, and we look forward to preparing many joyful meals there.
- Problem: Dark gloomy kitchens are depressing. The kitchen needs the sun more than other rooms, not less.
- Therefore: Place the main part of the kitchen counter on the south and southeast side of the kitchen, with big windows around it, so that sun can flood in and fill the kitchen with yellow light both morning and afternoon.
- In our home: We don’t have windows directly into our kitchen; it did not work out well with the layout of our house. Instead, our whole main floor is flooded with light from the windows on the west and south and those windows are visible from the kitchen. At certain times of day, the kitchen gets natural light strong enough to work by, but most of the time it requires the supplement of artificial light. We would have liked more direct light in the kitchen, but given the constraints we had, some natural light is turning out to be a reasonable compromise.