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The modern kitchen isn't "utilitarian", lots of it could be simpler and more functional. Cement slab flooring with epoxy coat is what you see in industrial kitc

The modern kitchen isn't "utilitarian", lots of it could be simpler and more functional. Cement slab flooring with epoxy coat is what you see in industrial kitchens (and mine!) because its tough to mar and easy to clean. This place has some fake wood "laminate". The cabinet doors are covered in frilly, unnecessary detail, bright work handles etc. The "center island" table this is a great idea but it should be an open frame table on casters. I don't know what you'd properly call this aesthetic, but its there and it has screwed over the design of the space at the cost of much utility.

ip26 5y ago
A kitchen is somewhere you live as well as work. Cement slab flooring is pretty uncomfortable to spend two hours working barefoot, especially in winter. It’s also worth acknowledging the existence of show kitchens, which really don’t care about utility at all, and considering them separately.
- kijin 5y ago
  Nobody in an industrial kitchen is supposed to work barefoot. :) For homes, heated cement slabs are so much better than the regular stuff. Slabs embedded with hot water tubes have a fairly large heat capacity, so it stays warm all day and transfers heat directly into your feet and up through the rest of your body no matter where you're standing. A layer of soft organic material on top of the slab will make it more comfortable to stand on as well, as long as you choose something that's easy to clean.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Ours works well 9 months of the year; its does suck in winter. in hot summertime barefoots on it works well :) "somewhere you live" is exactly the point. Our house has been a kennel as much as a house. Few people want that, we're just weird.
nerdponx 5y ago
You are describing extreme industrial utility. The blog author is describing pastoral whimsy. The modern American kitchen is probably about 2/3 of the way towards your version on a 1-d spectrum.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  > pastoral whimsy I think that's an ungenerous term for what was merely normal for thousands of years into the past. I'd argue we're still recovering from the brutalist ugliness of 1960s fashion and ideas -- the notion that despite our humble origins, man could transcend nature and do better than it. The widespread adoption of baby formula over breastfeeding is perhaps the saddest outworking of this notion, but it showed up everywhere else -- in brutalist architecture, cold metal furniture, metal Christmas trees, linoleum floors... Not that new synthetic materials are bad, but I would have hated to live through a time when natural beauty was at such a cultural ebb. I think we're still recovering from it, and we need more design leaders to help us remember natural beauty. Here are a couple of quotes from William Morris: "everything made by man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent." He also wrote, "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    You're responding to something that isn't what I said. Look at the painting and then look at the photo of the staged corner in the authors kitchen. The big difference is that the painting of the real working kitchen depicted an actual working space, it was busy and active and full of stuff and kind of chaotic. The upper walls were probably greasy from cooking and it probably smelled like food and wood smoke. I more or less agree with the sentiment of the article, by the way. The sterile home aesthetic makes absolutely no sense to me and it's not something I want or live out in my own life. But the reality is that a cute kitchen display like in the photo is neither practical nor sustainable unless you spend a lot of your time cleaning. I use cabinets because I actually want my counter space and because when I leave stuff out on the counter it gets dirty and dusty. Patina doesn't bother me, but grime does. Therefore I called it "pastoral whimsy". People started using cabinets because they wanted them and could actually afford them, not because they were somehow indoctrinated into using them.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
Those open storage tables and shelves that commercial kitchens¹ have are usable there because they have the main dry storage outside of the kitchen space. You keep some essentials there that are used many times every day, and the rest is moved into the kitchen as part of the prep phase and cleared out at the end of service. In big kitchens this is enough of a task that it's a role on its own: porter. If you were to use those as your main ingredient and tool storage without clearing it every day it would be a mess both in terms of visual clutter and just flour and shit spilling out everywhere. Is that more minimal than putting cabinet doors over it? I don't know actually, maybe. Which indicates to me that "minimal" is a subjective judgement based on certain criteria, and there are multiple valid measures of kitchen minimalism. I grew up in and worked for decades in commercial kitchens and I am often saying this. Commercial kitchens have a different set of constraints than home kitchens, and commercial kitchen design adopted wholesale is not going to be more usable than a well-designed consumer kitchen. It's not more minimal per se either. That open storage demands a closet worth of plastic bins to keep ingredients in, for example. BTW commercial kitchens pretty much all have terra cotta tiles for some reason. Must just be a good combo of cheap, durable, reasonably non-slip (which coated concrete definitely is not). ¹: Not industrial kitchens that's a different thing.

ip26 5y ago

A kitchen is somewhere you live as well as work. Cement slab flooring is pretty uncomfortable to spend two hours working barefoot, especially in winter. It’s also worth acknowledging the existence of show kitchens, which really don’t care about utility at all, and considering them separately.

kijin 5y ago
Nobody in an industrial kitchen is supposed to work barefoot. :) For homes, heated cement slabs are so much better than the regular stuff. Slabs embedded with hot water tubes have a fairly large heat capacity, so it stays warm all day and transfers heat directly into your feet and up through the rest of your body no matter where you're standing. A layer of soft organic material on top of the slab will make it more comfortable to stand on as well, as long as you choose something that's easy to clean.
h2odragon 5y ago
Ours works well 9 months of the year; its does suck in winter. in hot summertime barefoots on it works well :) "somewhere you live" is exactly the point. Our house has been a kennel as much as a house. Few people want that, we're just weird.

nerdponx 5y ago

You are describing extreme industrial utility. The blog author is describing pastoral whimsy. The modern American kitchen is probably about 2/3 of the way towards your version on a 1-d spectrum.

TimTheTinker 5y ago
> pastoral whimsy I think that's an ungenerous term for what was merely normal for thousands of years into the past. I'd argue we're still recovering from the brutalist ugliness of 1960s fashion and ideas -- the notion that despite our humble origins, man could transcend nature and do better than it. The widespread adoption of baby formula over breastfeeding is perhaps the saddest outworking of this notion, but it showed up everywhere else -- in brutalist architecture, cold metal furniture, metal Christmas trees, linoleum floors... Not that new synthetic materials are bad, but I would have hated to live through a time when natural beauty was at such a cultural ebb. I think we're still recovering from it, and we need more design leaders to help us remember natural beauty. Here are a couple of quotes from William Morris: "everything made by man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent." He also wrote, "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
- nerdponx 5y ago
  You're responding to something that isn't what I said. Look at the painting and then look at the photo of the staged corner in the authors kitchen. The big difference is that the painting of the real working kitchen depicted an actual working space, it was busy and active and full of stuff and kind of chaotic. The upper walls were probably greasy from cooking and it probably smelled like food and wood smoke. I more or less agree with the sentiment of the article, by the way. The sterile home aesthetic makes absolutely no sense to me and it's not something I want or live out in my own life. But the reality is that a cute kitchen display like in the photo is neither practical nor sustainable unless you spend a lot of your time cleaning. I use cabinets because I actually want my counter space and because when I leave stuff out on the counter it gets dirty and dusty. Patina doesn't bother me, but grime does. Therefore I called it "pastoral whimsy". People started using cabinets because they wanted them and could actually afford them, not because they were somehow indoctrinated into using them.

giraffe_lady 5y ago

Those open storage tables and shelves that commercial kitchens¹ have are usable there because they have the main dry storage outside of the kitchen space. You keep some essentials there that are used many times every day, and the rest is moved into the kitchen as part of the prep phase and cleared out at the end of service. In big kitchens this is enough of a task that it's a role on its own: porter. If you were to use those as your main ingredient and tool storage without clearing it every day it would be a mess both in terms of visual clutter and just flour and shit spilling out everywhere. Is that more minimal than putting cabinet doors over it? I don't know actually, maybe. Which indicates to me that "minimal" is a subjective judgement based on certain criteria, and there are multiple valid measures of kitchen minimalism. I grew up in and worked for decades in commercial kitchens and I am often saying this. Commercial kitchens have a different set of constraints than home kitchens, and commercial kitchen design adopted wholesale is not going to be more usable than a well-designed consumer kitchen. It's not more minimal per se either. That open storage demands a closet worth of plastic bins to keep ingredients in, for example. BTW commercial kitchens pretty much all have terra cotta tiles for some reason. Must just be a good combo of cheap, durable, reasonably non-slip (which coated concrete definitely is not). ¹: Not industrial kitchens that's a different thing.