No Cooking Please, We're Kitchens

The more you spend, the less useful it gets

Sometimes I come across an article that I read twice, very carefully, because I almost can’t believe I didn’t write it. Here’s one such piece that recently went up at The Bulwark, from culture writer Clare Coffey. She wrote about kitchens, and how the expensive, photogenic, sparkling kitchens in many new buildings and flip houses are basically useless set pieces.

I’ve written over the years about hotel rooms, open floorplans, new construction, and other topics that touch on both interior design and the deeper idea of houses and floorplans as urban design and land use in miniature. Or rather, maybe, both home design and urban design are two branches of something else. However you think about this, interior design is so much more than colors and styles. It determines how family life and social occasions unfold and function. It’s not everything; but it’s the context of everything.

Coffey (or The Bulwark) titles her piece “The ‘Mortuary Chic’ of Today’s Aspirational Kitchen.” That’s her perfect name for this:

The floor may be hardwood, engineered hardwood, or gray vinyl laminate. The layout might be a galley or a square or a formless open floor plan void. But the overwhelming impression is one of gleaming white: gleaming white shaker cabinets, gleaming white subway tile backsplash, gleaming white marble countertops, an enormous gleaming white farmhouse sink, gleaming white walls and trim, all mercilessly illuminated by recessed LED lighting. A gleaming stainless steel refrigerator may break up the endless white. But overall, the ethos of the contemporary aspirational kitchen is the sanitary sterility of a mortuary.

Anyone who has recently looked for a new place, or who browses real estate listings online, will know exactly what she’s talking about. She goes on, and here captures why there’s something soulless about this aesthetic, by comparing it to a real kitchen. The “mortuary chic” kitchen is an attempt to remove all the work and friction of actually cooking together, and instead it creates the constant stress of messing up the perfect look. Via poor design, it turns people—not to mention children!—and their inevitable messes into a nuisance.

There are so many structural eccentricities in that kitchen, built as it was in the early twentieth century. There is much that is frustrating: the cabinets that need replacing, the leak that finally got repaired, the appliances that turn out to be too weak for the Coffey thunderdome. But whenever I return to it, my heart swells with pride: for the beauty, even in the most chaotic moments, of all that warm wood; for the ingenious, beautiful, personal amendments and additions; for the sheer amount of work that has gone into it; for the deceptively intuitive way it invites people in and channels the flow of a crowd in a small space. But most of all, I am proud of that kitchen for the countless meals it has produced, the unending occupation by large and careless groups of children, the constant wear and tear it has been subjected to. And here it still stands: tougher than all of us and getting more beautiful every year.

This makes me think of a comparison I’ve made before, and which I frequently think about: the distinction between premium and professional. A premium kitchen, in a residential setting or in a big-box showroom, is heavily styled and complicated. The most expensive consumer-grade appliances tend to, say, have shiny, difficult-to-maintain finishes or lots of electronic gadgetry. But the actual base appliance is probably not that different. If you take apart the $800 off-white box fridge and the $3,000 stainless fridge with a screen and a camera and a digital water/ice dispenser, is the $3,000 model actually a better fridge? I really doubt it. Same with any appliance. This might be less true of fixtures and finishes, but I think it’s still partly true there.

So then, compared to all that, look at true professional-grade or commercial appliances, or kitchens overall. The appliances are probably stainless, but they’re angular and simply shaped (easy to clean) and very simple in terms of controls, with far less digital and electronic gadgetry (quick to use, easy to repair).

The countertops and backsplashes and floors are going to be tough, durable, and easy-to-clean materials. Are you going to see white or gray wood or gleaming tile? Almost certainly not. A commercial kitchen is made to be used; a consumer-grade showroom kitchen is made to be looked at.

Similarly, look at how few home kitchens, even in detached houses, have a real vent hood to the outside. As soon as you’re doing more than sautéing vegetables or boiling pasta or frying eggs, the place fills up with smoke. When my wife and I were looking for a house, we saw so many stylish, modern kitchens without any ventilation. I can only assume that the expectation is simply that you aren’t really going to be cooking. I have never lived in a place where it’s possible to so much as sear a steak without setting off the fire alarm.

I’ll end with something I talk about a lot: perception. These finnicky, fussy, fancy home interiors create a perception that people are a nuisance. That children are a nuisance. It’s a similar logic to the idea that “homelessness is a housing problem” (i.e. in the absence of a broken housing market, mass homelessness would not exist.)

You might say something like “Annoying children are a home design problem,” i.e. bad design and unforgiving materials can make it feel like a given thing is more disruptive than it is. So much of what we blame on people is really inextricable from the circumstances we put them in.

What do you think?

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Related Reading:

New Construction Blues, Northern Virginia Edition

Good Friction

Nooks and Crannies

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