Lifestyle Design
“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).”
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Kitchens are the centers and hearts of our homes. While growing up we headed for the kitchen for snacks, to check in after school and to find out what was happening with the rest of the family. As young adults in our first apartment we equipped our kitchens from second hand stores and with hand-me-downs. We might have discovered an interest in cooking or entertaining as we had friends over and socialized surrounded by friends and food. We probably discovered that at a party, everyone ends up in the kitchen, no matter how hard you’d try to move the crowd to other parts of the house. Later on, in our own homes, the kitchen assumed other roles: Relaxation center, information depot, a spot for coffee before work, a place to cook for dinner parties and a place to store and use all those wedding gift appliances and housewares.
Eventually almost everyone starts thinking about ways to improve their kitchen. Perhaps a friend or business colleague remodels their kitchen or builds a new home with that state of the art kitchen you’ve always dreamed of. Maybe your old inefficient layout, outdated look and aged appliances don’t work as well for you now. Your lifestyle changes as you change and the ways you use your kitchen change with it. Children, careers, hobbies and new technology all affect the way we use our kitchens.
These lifestyle considerations are often the underlying reason for remodeling and building new kitchens. Yet they are seldom considered during the early planning of a new kitchen. Instead we tend to focus on cabinet styles, wall colors, appliances and all the many items that are found in every kitchen. All too often a new kitchen project begins and ends with a visit to a cabinet store resulting in a kitchen plan based on how many cabinets will fit in a space and this month’s flavor of the week in finishes and styles. Design comes in second to salesmanship.
Contemporary Kitchen Design: Lifestyle Design
This brings us to the present. Cooking has become a serious avocation with many people. Not just traditional cooking but cooking that includes techniques from cultures all over the world. Technology changes constantly and the kitchen has been the benefactor of many new breakthroughs in lighting, communications, appliances, heating and air conditioning systems, recycling and many other processes. Some kitchens in homes owned by two income families without children or singles are rarely used for food preparation other than an occasional microwaved meal. Others are reproductions of restaurant kitchens complete with high BTU ranges and commercial refrigerators.
Understanding what choices will work for your kitchen can be confusing to say the least. Your lifestyle is not the same as that of your boss, your siblings or your neighbors and your kitchen design may not resemble theirs. Ultimately, if you want a kitchen that truly works for you and your household’s needs, you must take a good look at how you use your kitchen now. This is the basis of the lifestyle design concept.
The lifestyle design concept is simple:
The way you utilize and enjoy your kitchen should guide you through every step of the design process from mechanicals to style decisions.
If you don’t cook often you don’t need a restaurant range. An inexpensive cooktop will do for occasional use.
If your kids swarm over the kitchen day and night, doing homework, entertaining friends, using the phone and helping with dinner, you’re going to want a very different kitchen than the executive couple with no children who entertain regularly, often turning their kitchen over to caterer or professional cook.
In all likelihood your kitchen will reflect some combination of uses based on your family or household lifestyle.
As a way to get you thinking about lifestyle as a design criteria, let’s look at some typical ways different people use their kitchens and how those kitchens differ from each other. Once you’ve looked at these examples we’ll look at how you use your kitchen now and what you’d like in the future.
Let’s take a look at an assortment of kitchens that reflect the specific needs and lifestyles of their owners. Working couples, busy families, singles, retirees, serious amateur and professional cooks and the harried executive all have their own ways of utilizing their kitchens. These examples show some of the ways these lifestyles result in very different but effective kitchens.
The Lifestyle Design Articles
Here’s some articles on Kitchens that fit certain lifestyles:
