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What drives me nuts are the goddamn desks in kitchens. Someone in the 80s looked at room-use studies, saw that the most important part of the house, the hub of

What drives me nuts are the goddamn desks in kitchens. Someone in the 80s looked at room-use studies, saw that the most important part of the house, the hub of family life, was the kitchen table but it was mostly used as a desk and/or document storage area, and thought “oh, this means I should build a desk into the kitchen cabinets!” It’s a bone-headed, ugly, inconvenient failure of an home design idea that afflicts tons of houses built in the 80s through the very-early 2000s.

solardev 3y ago
Wait, what? Was this in the US? I've never heard of or seen this, I don't think. Got a picture of an example?
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-feature-of-the-past https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-featu... The “before” picture with the oak cabinets somewhat down the page comes the closest to what most of these look like, in the wild. Often their placement is even worse than that, though. They almost always end up a chaotic dump-area for miscellaneous crap, in my experience, and usually end up even worse-off if the owner attempts, initially, to use them as an actual desk, because then they’ll have the clutter of a desk chair and maybe even a monitor and keyboard among the pile of other junk. They are basically never better than having more ordinary counter space or a cabinet pantry in the same spot. Usually they occur in houses that are plenty large enough to have other desks in several places, not little space-constrained apartments. They come from a fundamental misunderstanding of why kitchen tables end up used the way they do. I’ve never seen them successfully replace the kitchen table as the shared family desk and hub-of-organizational-activity, because they’re much worse for that than the table is.
  - solardev 3y ago
    What was the reasoning behind this...? Why would anyone ever want to work on a tiny desk by the fridge? Lol I feel like I'm getting a history lesson from aliens. It's so bizarre!
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Studies revealed that the kitchen table is the hot-spot of family life at home (at least in the US) and that most of the time it’s used as a desk and/or document dumping area, not for eating. Some designers and architects reacted to this by deciding this meant people wanted a shitty desk in the kitchen, so started adding them, presumably thinking they’d done something very smart and helpful. … actually this could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong, now that I think about it.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Whoa. That's fascinating. I never knew this was a thing. Thanks for the details! > could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong Lol, exactly!
Waterluvian 3y ago
Yeah. The house I grew up in was built in 89 and the kitchen had this little built-in desk beside the pantry. And it really felt like a “you sit here and take a corded phone call and make notes” it was far too small to be a serious desk for work and yet it had drawers and cubbies above for documents. In its defense it got used as a place to store school forms and sports forms and other “family administration” stuff that was too daily to belong in the office with all the taxes and financials and warranties.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Yeah, the core problem with the idea is that even if you have one, it’s nearly always more pleasant and comfortable (and less in other people’s way) to sit at the kitchen table for the same clerical/homework/WFH activities, just as one would before these started being added. It fails to be better than the thing it’s trying to replace, and is less-useful (and uglier) than having more ordinary kitchen cabinets and/or counter space, which can do just as good a job of storing paperwork and calendars and such, without the misguided specific-purpose design.
  - solardev 3y ago
    So basically the 80s version of Microsoft Teams?

solardev 3y ago

Wait, what? Was this in the US? I've never heard of or seen this, I don't think. Got a picture of an example?

hotnfresh 3y ago
https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-feature-of-the-past https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-featu... The “before” picture with the oak cabinets somewhat down the page comes the closest to what most of these look like, in the wild. Often their placement is even worse than that, though. They almost always end up a chaotic dump-area for miscellaneous crap, in my experience, and usually end up even worse-off if the owner attempts, initially, to use them as an actual desk, because then they’ll have the clutter of a desk chair and maybe even a monitor and keyboard among the pile of other junk. They are basically never better than having more ordinary counter space or a cabinet pantry in the same spot. Usually they occur in houses that are plenty large enough to have other desks in several places, not little space-constrained apartments. They come from a fundamental misunderstanding of why kitchen tables end up used the way they do. I’ve never seen them successfully replace the kitchen table as the shared family desk and hub-of-organizational-activity, because they’re much worse for that than the table is.
- solardev 3y ago
  What was the reasoning behind this...? Why would anyone ever want to work on a tiny desk by the fridge? Lol I feel like I'm getting a history lesson from aliens. It's so bizarre!
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Studies revealed that the kitchen table is the hot-spot of family life at home (at least in the US) and that most of the time it’s used as a desk and/or document dumping area, not for eating. Some designers and architects reacted to this by deciding this meant people wanted a shitty desk in the kitchen, so started adding them, presumably thinking they’d done something very smart and helpful. … actually this could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong, now that I think about it.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Whoa. That's fascinating. I never knew this was a thing. Thanks for the details! > could probably be used as the basis for some kind of presentation or article about how data-driven design or decision-making can go very wrong Lol, exactly!

Waterluvian 3y ago

Yeah. The house I grew up in was built in 89 and the kitchen had this little built-in desk beside the pantry. And it really felt like a “you sit here and take a corded phone call and make notes” it was far too small to be a serious desk for work and yet it had drawers and cubbies above for documents. In its defense it got used as a place to store school forms and sports forms and other “family administration” stuff that was too daily to belong in the office with all the taxes and financials and warranties.

hotnfresh 3y ago
Yeah, the core problem with the idea is that even if you have one, it’s nearly always more pleasant and comfortable (and less in other people’s way) to sit at the kitchen table for the same clerical/homework/WFH activities, just as one would before these started being added. It fails to be better than the thing it’s trying to replace, and is less-useful (and uglier) than having more ordinary kitchen cabinets and/or counter space, which can do just as good a job of storing paperwork and calendars and such, without the misguided specific-purpose design.
- solardev 3y ago
  So basically the 80s version of Microsoft Teams?