While Weninger-Ramirez tries to hide plugs and appliances, a modest remedy, Schumacher Homes’ “messy kitchen” opts for a more extreme approach: to hide one kitchen behind another.
The design looks familiar at first. An open kitchen island faces a large, vaulted great room with second-floor gallery and flanks an open-plan dining area. But this part of the kitchen is markedly smaller than the average in a home of this size (3,718 square feet by stock plans). The public kitchen boasts a range top, oven, microwave, and sink, but the rest of the kitchen, at first, appears to be missing.
It is housed in a separate room behind the public kitchen. There, the refrigerator, pantry storage, cabinets, and another sink and dishwasher are situated, with a long countertop extending the length of the space. The idea is that the pre-meal food prep and post-meal food waste can be stowed out of sight in the “messy kitchen,” leaving the public kitchen for the cooking, eating, and visiting.
Mary Becker, Schumacher’s vice president of sales and marketing, wasn’t sure where the phrase “messy kitchen” came from, although she and her associates disclaimed having invented the term. She situates the design squarely in the targets of conventional, suburban living. “It’s great for those big Saturday Costco trips to store all your stuff,” Becker said of the expansive pantry in the prep kitchen. In truth, the idea is really just a new interpretation of the old distinction between kitchen, pantry, and dining room. A kitchen for the mess, and a public space for eating it. The difference is that the public space is another kitchen instead of a dining room.
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- The Curse of an Open Floor Plan, Sunday, May 27, 2018 - 22:43