The Kitchen as a Place to Be

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Norman Potter

technological

late 20th century • furnish •

As a designer, Norman Potter writes about the basic and simple issues of kitchen design as a form of resistance to the proliferation of industrialised time- and labour-saving devices and appliances in contemporary kitchens. This critique also questions standardised commercial storage units with worktops, arguing that they have an economic basis antithetical to kitchen design. While he speaks of this space as an instrument and a workshop, Potter uses his writing and built projects to advocate placing greater value upon preparing and eating meals as ritualistic social gatherings.

Kitchen design is usually impoverished, and its terms of reference falsified, as much by consumer fantasy as by the commercial pressures that incidentally nourish it; but the High Street retail store is the more obvious culprit. Properly speaking, there are people and places – equally individual – and there is the ‘kitchen situation’ to be variously interpreted and made actual. Ideally, there should be nothing else, though kitchen requirements can be generalised-out, within limits, in a modern building design for an unknown user. Such kitchens will generally be minimal but in their own terms none the worse for that – one thinks immediately of Wells Coates in London NW3 and Le Corbusier in Zürich. The more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it). The usual alternative, from any furniture shop, is a permutation of the familiar storage units with worktops, distinguished in price, but little else, by surface finish, detail, and material. Such assemblies have little to do with kitchen design: their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin.

One has to start somewhere in considering the nature of a kitchen, the ‘hub of the house,’ and where better than with the exemplary minimal example illustrated here. Its weight is four ounces, its form is a model of clarity and intelligence, and no product designer has yet reached near enough to design the life out of it (nor would it pay him, at this cheaper end of the trade). It has to be said that the fuel – meta tablets – is also in use as a slug killer, and so is environmentally suspect. Even without this handicap, I don’t see this kitchen winning a Design Award. It should do, of course, if only to remind us how much junk there is around with allegedly better credentials. Every household should have one.

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Kitchen designers are obliged to design with, and to integrate in various ways, a certain amount of technical equipment that is industrially produced – taps, sinks, cookers, etc, apart from portable items – and there, of course, is the rub. Much diligent catalogue searching is entailed, often in out-of-the-way trade sources, discontinued lines, etc; some products may need to be de-styled or practically modified; and a few may even require visual isolation as the only acceptable price of their inclusion at all. I have spent too many hours in my life dismantling junky pseudo-high-tech plastic assemblies, stripping the surplus dials and insignia off them, and replacing, or relocating, their indifferently designed finger controls. However, the ready and recent wide availability of divided oven, grill, and counter-top insert has been welcome.

I do not propose to discuss the full range of kitchen options, all the way from the traditional farmhouse living room – the Aga option – to the rail or airplane snack-servery. Much can be studied and learned from such solutions, and not only in terms of their ergonomics. There are also (in this area as in others) many special cases to which satisfactory answers have never been developed; as, for instance, in the bed-sitting-room and for people with physical handicap. I began work on a mobile kitchen but had to abandon it. Far less comprehensively, the mobile trolley is interesting to compare in the two examples illustrated. The Canella trolley holds its liquor better than the well-known Aalto alternative, and is in other and more detailed respects a more practical answer. On the other hand, the Aalto is so beautifully generalised (and so beautiful to look at) that it can be used for almost anything that fits. Such inspired simplicity bespeaks a natural survivor, as might be said of other Aalto pieces which seem, at first acquaintance, imperfectly realised in the organic impress of their use.

Returning to more ordinary kitchen situations, they should reflect the values people attach to preparing food and eating together. Obviously this has something to do with the time, money, and space available. I have known personally only one true artist of the cookbook – Patience Gray – and she made do, I noticed, with no more than a few (good) pots and pans in a far corner of her studio. Sharing the delight of a meal with her, it occurred to me that Schnabel’s advice for the food of the spirit – that music is to be experienced, not consumed – is also something to try for in kitchen design; a guiding principle in search of formal and material equivalence. At least the feel of a kitchen might militate in that direction. (… p 137)

Confronting the more ambitious structure for the Penton kitchen, ‘simple’ is not perhaps the first word that comes to mind; though I believe there is a necessary and rational clarity in the way the elements come together, without which the approach would seem arbitrary and over-structured. The work was commissioned by an architect (Richard Penton) mainly for the use of his mother and her housekeeper/companion, who greatly enjoyed cooking and wanted a kitchen environment of some distinctive identity. The requirements

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and various alternative ways of meeting them were analysed in considerable detail in a job report extending to other matters of use and layout in the house; the report was in fact (as of course all reports should be) a fully consultative instrument. This kitchen occupied the centre of a former ground-floor drawing room, which was opened out into a room adjoining to form one continuous space between north and south windows. The kitchen, with dining space adjoining, touching and noting all its perimeters – was by its physical nature distinguished from loose furniture elsewhere in the large room, a consideration that appealed to its users (which was just as well). The job was workshop-built but for London, which required some unit-prefabrication and other standardised details, in order to keep within a fairly tight budget. This degree of generality, meeting requirements highly idiosyncratic in all other respects, gave the job its special character – half-way between joinery and simplified cabinetmaking.

As far as possible the whole kitchen was considered in the round, i.e. as seen and used in movement: there are no ‘backs’ in the accepted sense, except where a (required) partial screen faces the related south end of the room. There is next-to-no gadgetry: this is the opposite extreme to the highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first. The Penton kitchen is efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure, and a positive sense of location to its concerns – of being in and with them. A definite circulation pattern is imposed by the usual sequences of preparation, cooking, clearing, followed through obviously enough by the placing of parts, but the structure interpenetrates quite freely with the rest of the room-space. Since one complex is therefore entered within another, the kitchen parts are closely grouped, almost within reaching distance from a central working position, to offset a possible ambiguity in relationship. Help with various operations, such as washing-up or clearing from the dining table, or table setting, therefore takes place across the relevant work-surfaces rather than side-on to them. There is distinctively an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ to this kitchen (therefore) – given added definition by the shallow platform or podium from which the structure rises, but between the in and the out there is active functional (and random) discourse.

The job was done mostly with mahogany and parana pine, plywood where used being faced with white, blue or black formica. The sink working surface, mahogany, is used for food preparation and has (apart from the fixed chopping board) a catalyst-acting bar finish, heat and moisture resistant (‘Phenopol’). A small standard silent refrigerator is located at optimum height for sight and reach; the cooker is isolated and vented through a former chimney breast. Waste is taken from the end of the sink surface into a vented cupboard-bin immediately beneath.

It is interesting that this kitchen is difficult to discuss in terms of ‘description’ and ‘detail’ because in fact it was all detail, and the classical task of subordinating components to

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elements (a preoccupation of mine) without losing their ready and natural availability, was here a special interest in the job. For instance, the client wanted certain items – mainly glassware – displayed and lit and on view from the dining area. This occurs in the two-sided upper storage cupboard – distinguished by screening in clear plate glass (wired glass below) – which is fluorescent lit from below, but the horizontal trough had also to accommodate a sliding cutlery tray at one level, and a bread board at another.

There are two support systems, the primary one in softwood grooved for lighting cable, the secondary being a run of mahogany horizontals which locate, and hold, containing storage boxes in the required places, but also locate switches and socket outlets (the switches therefore appear in the nearest thing to an apron frame beneath work surfaces). The doors to all cupboards (other than the standard fridge) are treated as separate applied flat screens projecting forward and above the bottom edge of these mahogany horizontals, the extent of projection forming the handle (some doors therefore open downwards). A cupboard opening only one way – towards the dining table – does duty for what is usually called a ‘sideboard;’ that is to say, it houses items such as table napkins and cereals which simply go backwards and forwards to the table without any more interior kitchen circulation. Otherwise there is a through-circulation of items to and from the table – clearing to the outside of the sink surface, washing, drying, storage into the two-sided glass fronted cupboard, table-laying from the other side of it. The relatively small surface under the fridge to one side of it is free of this circulation. The small cupboard above – hesitating in its orientation – is for items (preserves, etc) used partly within the kitchen and partly on the table. (From the angle of inclination, the kitchen interior is seen to win, but some items (condiments, etc) might be duplicated in the two cupboards, whereas marmalade, as an instance, might store in the table cupboard. The logic of this would depend partly on familiarity of use.)

The triangulated unit above the sink, supporting a bleakly exposed but on the whole direct and acceptable water heater, has provision for a loudspeaker extension from hi-fi at the south end of the room, not fitted in the photograph. The sink unit derives direct daylight from the north-facing windows. The cooker was the plainest and simplest then available with the door opening the right way round, but even then all the controls were reorganised onto a panel at its rear. There is cookbook stowage just round the corner as part of the screen, with provision for bills, and nearby there is hanging space for kitchen aprons and the like.

Shown here is the kitchen landscape as seen from the dining table: visible here are the sliding cutlery box, the white painted end-grain of a fixed chopping board, the colour-coded switch plates on the frame below the sink surface, and the clearance gap to wastebin below.

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The way this job is handled owed much to a general standpoint on conversions, namely, to enter history into them, and to expose the meeting of old and new expressively – the usual alternative being to modify or screen an existing situation (as with a false ceiling) and use it merely as a weight-carrying discarded shell. I repeat here what must be said of several jobs – and they did have to me an added investigative interest in spatial terms – because I think the approach did add not only a situational clarity to what was going on, but also a valid sense of continuity; the taking of food being a prime agent of precisely that. There is nothing really instant about food; although meals are pretty basic, there is process, ritual, and continuity involved, and I think this kitchen had the feel of that.

In a later job with the same distance problem from the workshop – a small bookshop also described here – I took a quite different approach to the way the job was built, but then bookshelves are not fully screened containers. Here the distinction was stressed, though partly, I think, as a manufacturing and assembly convenience. As to the construction of these containers, if the workshop had owned a heavy spindle, I would have preferred a comb/finger corner jointing system for its through-and-through character – dovetails would have been quite wrong. The joint used was natural to the Dominion, gave under test an adequately spread glue area, and allowed through-machining of grooves (i.e. without stopping) top and bottom – for, in this case, the sliding glass. Normally such a joint is protected from racking stress by a glued and planted back panel – which I now find worrying looking at the two-sided cupboards which of course lack that benefit, though in fact the construction seems to have held up over many years without trouble.

It so happens that this kitchen was rated a success. When the owner eventually moved elsewhere, it seems she was so attached to the structure that joiners were employed to dismantle the whole thing and re-erect it on an entirely different site. The results of this I have never dared to explore. The design was, of course, distinctively a one-off – so much for ‘place and occasion in design’ (but at least a continuing one-off for its user). Since the considered alternative was apparently to present the kitchen to the V&A, I can hardly complain on either count. (… p 151)

Norman Potter, Models & Constructs: Margin Notes to a Design Culture, Hyphen Press (London), 1990.

(Excerpts pp 135–51)

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Kitchen 'as became.' Photo © Estate of Norman Potter, 1990. Reproduced from Norman Potter, Models & Constructs, Hyphen Press, (London), 1990, p150.

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