The Kitchen as a Place to Be

Author: Norman Potter Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; excerpted from Models & Constructs: Margin Notes to a Design Culture, Hyphen Press, London, 1990, excerpts pp. 135–51; text and illustration © Estate of Norman Potter, 1990, reprinted by permission of Hyphen Press) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 264–269) Raw file: raw/chapters/potter-2006-kitchen-as-place-to-be.md

Summary

Potter's designer-practitioner polemic against the commercial kitchen and his case study for the alternative. Kitchen design, he argues, 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" — the furniture-shop's standardised storage-units-with-worktops "have little to do with kitchen design: their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin." Properly speaking there are only "people and places – equally individual – and… the 'kitchen situation' to be variously interpreted and made actual"; the exemplary minimal kitchen is the four-ounce Meta-fuel stove, "a model of clarity and intelligence" that "no product designer has yet reached near enough to design the life out of," and the individual kitchen is "a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)." The bulk of the text is a detailed first-person account of the Penton kitchen — commissioned by the architect Richard Penton for his mother and her housekeeper/companion, workshop-built for London, considered "in the round… as seen and used in movement," with "next-to-no gadgetry," "efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure," an "inside" and an "outside" with "active functional (and random) discourse" between them, and converted with history "entered" into it — because "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." Rated a success, the kitchen was dismantled and re-erected on an entirely different site when its owner moved; the considered alternative was donation to the V&A.

Key Claims

The double impoverishment of kitchen design: "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" — the supply side (commerce) and the demand side (consumer fantasy) jointly falsify the kitchen's terms of reference, with the retail store the "more obvious" culprit.
The kitchen as situation, not product: "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." The kitchen is an interpreted situation individual to its people and place, not a purchasable assembly — the design object is the relation, not the unit.
The legitimate minimum and its exemplars: 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 generalized minimal kitchen is legitimate where the user is unknown; what is not legitimate is the pseudo-individual commercial product.
The workshop economy and its class limit: "The more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)" — the individualized kitchen exists only through workshop production, and workshop production presupposes access to a workshop and the money to commission it. The one-off interior has an economic threshold.
The commercial unit's origin-principle: the furniture-shop alternative 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" — form is traced not to use but to what production and marketing can feasibly sell; price-difference is finish-difference, not design-difference.
The four-ounce exemplar: the minimal kitchen illustrated is a Meta-fuel stove: "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)." The true kitchen exemplar is the cheapest object in the field — and its virtue is precisely that the design profession has not "designed the life out of" it.
The Design Award satire: "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." The award-system is the junk's credential system; the exemplary object would win only to shame the credentialed junk. (The confession that Meta fuel "is also in use as a slug killer, and so is environmentally suspect" — the exemplar is chosen with eyes open.)
Integration as "the rub": 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… and there, of course, is the rub" — the designer's predicament: the kitchen must absorb industrially produced equipment whose design the designer does not control.
De-styling as design labour: integration requires "diligent catalogue searching… in out-of-the-way trade sources, discontinued lines"; some products need "de-styling or practically modified"; some need "visual isolation as the only acceptable price of their inclusion at all." Potter's own practice: "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" — design against the equipment's own styling.
Ergonomics is not the whole measure: the full range from "the traditional farmhouse living room – the Aga option – to the rail or airplane snack-servery" offers "much… to be studied and learned from such solutions, and not only in terms of their ergonomics" — the kitchen-design spectrum is wider than the efficiency axis, and Potter declines to adjudicate it.
The unsolved special cases: "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" — a named design gap (bed-sitter, disability, mobility) that the kitchen-design industry has not answered.
The trolley comparison: 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" — practicality against generality: the Aalto survives because its generality admits almost any use; "imperfectly realised in the organic impress of their use" as the survivor-quality of other Aalto pieces.
The values thesis: "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." The kitchen's design brief is the values its users attach to preparing food and eating together — not equipment inventory — within the constraint triad of time, money, space.
The Patience Gray counter-example: "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" — the counter-example that cooking's art does not scale with equipment: a few good pots in a corner suffice for the master.
Experience, not consumption, as the design principle: "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." Schnabel's aesthetic dictum is transposed from music to kitchen design: the kitchen as an instrument of experience rather than a consumption machine, with "formal and material equivalence" as the goal and "the feel of a kitchen" as its minimum condition.
The client brief: the Penton kitchen "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 commissioning brief is enjoyment and identity, not efficiency; the clients are the cook(s) themselves.
The job report as consultative instrument: the requirements and alternatives "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" — the written analysis as the participatory instrument, design's documentation as consultation.
Generality within idiosyncrasy: the kitchen occupied the centre of a former drawing room opened into an adjoining room "to form one continuous space between north and south windows"; workshop-built at distance 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" — the one-off achieved through standardized details, joinery and cabinetmaking hybridized.
Designed for movement, with no backs: "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" — the kitchen structure treated as an object with no rear, designed for the moving user's sight and use rather than the plan's frontal elevation.
The anti-Taylorist pole: "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 specified against the time-and-labour-saving kitchen — gadgetry-minimality as the positive programme.
Efficiency redefined: "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." Efficiency is not denied but re-founded: the measure is pleasure and locatedness ("being in and with" one's concerns), not saved minutes.
Cooperation built into the counter's geometry: a circulation pattern is imposed by "the usual sequences of preparation, cooking, clearing," but "the structure interpenetrates quite freely with the rest of the room-space"; the parts are grouped "almost within reaching distance from a central working position," so that "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" — cooperation is a property of the worktop's orientation: across, not side-on.
Inside and outside within the kitchen: "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 inside/outside dialectic rebuilt at the scale of the kitchen structure itself, with discourse (both functional and random) running between the terms.
All detail: "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 elements (a preoccupation of mine) without losing their ready and natural availability, was here a special interest in the job" — the design totality is detail; the classical subordination of components to elements is the job's method, with availability preserved.
The orientation cupboard: "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.)" — territory decided at the scale of the marmalade jar: the cupboard's orientation is a negotiation between kitchen-interior and table, settled by "familiarity of use."
The one-way sideboard cupboard: "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" — the through-circulation of table things (clearing, washing, drying, storage into the two-sided glass-fronted cupboard, table-laying from the other side) built into the cabinetry's orientation: the kitchen-dining adjacency made circulation.
Entering history into conversions: "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" — conversion as expressive meeting of old and new (the cooker vented through "a former chimney breast") against the shell-and-screen alternative.
Food's temporality — the thesis of the title: "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." The meal is the home's continuity-agent; the kitchen's design burden is to carry that process-ritual-continuity as "feel."
Constructional honesty: for the two-sided containers "a comb/finger corner jointing system for its through-and-through character" was preferred — "dovetails would have been quite wrong"; the joint "natural to the Dominion" allowed "through-machining of grooves… top and bottom"; the hindsight worry about the back-panel-less two-sided cupboards ("which I now find worrying… though in fact the construction seems to have held up over many years without trouble") — constructional honesty as a design value, revisited across decades.
The one-off and its place-occasion paradox: "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)." The kitchen that grew from a place and occasion was moved to another site — the place-occasion principle breached by its own success; what survives is the user's continuing one-off.
Attachment as the success measure: "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 kitchen's success is measured by attachment strong enough to move the structure; and the museum alternative — "the considered alternative was apparently to present the kitchen to the V&A" — marks the domestic instrument's museum fate as the road not taken.
The editors' frame: "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" (editors, p. 264) — the Intimus headnote classifies the selection "technological / late 20th century • furnish."

Connections

Concepts: kitchen (the resistant workshop/instrument register: the "kitchen situation" against the High Street unit) · mechanization (the frictionless kitchen named and refused; the de-styling of appliances) · taylorism ("time and labour saving comes first" — the Taylorist kitchen as the named opposite extreme; efficiency re-founded on pleasure) · consumerism ("consumer fantasy" as the kitchen's falsifying demand; the commercial assembly's price-difference-without-design-difference) · everyday-life (food's "process, ritual, and continuity" as the everyday's domestic temporality) · dwelling (continuity through the taking of food; the structure re-erected on a new site) · domestic-interior (the kitchen as built structure against "loose furniture"; the one-off interior) · dining-room (the kitchen-dining adjacency; the through-circulation of table things; the one-way sideboard cupboard) · self-build (the workshop job; "first find your workshop, and then afford it") · simplicity (the four-ounce kitchen's "model of clarity and intelligence"; Aalto's "inspired simplicity") · inside-outside-dialectic (the kitchen's own inside/outside with "active functional (and random) discourse" between) · movement-perception ("considered in the round, i.e. as seen and used in movement") · material-memory ("enter history into" conversions; the former chimney breast) · palimpsest (conversion against the false-ceiling shell) · manifest-and-latent-functions (the manifest function — preparation efficiency — subordinated to latent ones: pleasure, identity, ritual, cooperation) · comfort (pleasure and "the feel of a kitchen" as the design's operative criteria) · work-leisure-distinction (labour-saving refused as the kitchen's end: preparing food valued in itself) · design-reform (the High Street as the upholsterer's twentieth-century successor; de-styling as reform labour) · structural-furniture (the kitchen as structure among loose furniture; two-sided containers and their joinery) · taylorism-adjacent frankfurt-kitchen-lineage audit (the frictionless kitchen as the named enemy) · everyday-life's ritual register.

Authors: Norman Potter — the designer-builder author · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection · Le Corbusier — the cited minimal-kitchen precedent (Zürich)

Debates: theory-of-the-everyday (the everyday's process/ritual/continuity defended at the scale of the kitchen instrument against labour-saving efficiency) · werkbund-debate (the commercial unit's "essential uniformity" as production-driven standardization against the individual workshop job)

Related source notes: Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the continuous-kitchen norm Potter writes against ("the production ideal of the modern factory… an unbroken flow of activity"; "time and labour saving comes first" is that norm's thesis) · Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the kitchen/dining modernist audit Potter's kitchen answers with pleasure, identity and continuity · The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the frictionless timetable-kitchen ("a kitchen is a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet") against which Potter's "next-to-no gadgetry" kitchen is the built counter-proposal · A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the founding kitchen-as-economy whose efficiency doctrine Potter's value-led kitchen reverses · Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the palimpsest/appropriation frame Potter's "enter history into" conversions practice · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the anthology's introduction framing the selection.

Direct Quotes

"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." (p. 264)

"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" (p. 264)

"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." (p. 264)

"The more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)." (p. 264)

"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." (p. 264)

"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)." (p. 264)

"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." (p. 264)

"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." (p. 265)

"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." (p. 265)

"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." (p. 265)

"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." (p. 265)

"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." (p. 265)

"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. 265)

"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." (pp. 265–266)

"the report was in fact (as of course all reports should be) a fully consultative instrument." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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." (p. 266)

"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 elements (a preoccupation of mine) without losing their ready and natural availability, was here a special interest in the job." (pp. 266–267)

"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.)" (p. 267)

"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." (p. 267)

"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." (p. 268)

"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." (p. 268)

"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." (p. 268)

"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. 268)

"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." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 264)

Open Questions

The economic threshold of the individual kitchen. "The more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)" — is the interpreted, individual "kitchen situation" structurally a privilege (workshop access + commissioning budget), and can the High Street's standardized alternative be reformed from within, or only bypassed? Compare the Beechers' economy programme (design for those without) — Potter writes from the workshop, they from the plan.
Efficiency and pleasure. "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." Is this a redefinition of efficiency (pleasure as efficiency's measure) or its refusal? Can "efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure" be operationalized as a design criterion, or does it remain a manifesto?
The frictionless kitchen as named enemy. Potter's "highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first" is exactly Lupton & Miller's continuous kitchen (the "miniaturized, open plan factory," "established by the end of the 1930s and still remains powerful today") and the Frankfurt-kitchen lineage. Is Potter's "next-to-no gadgetry" kitchen a real alternative to the continuous kitchen or its negation at one-off scale — can the values-led kitchen be generalized at all (the Wells Coates/Le Corbusier minimal kitchen being his own concession that it can, but only minimally)?
The V&A counterfactual. "the considered alternative was apparently to present the kitchen to the V&A" — the kitchen that was dismantled and re-erected on a different site instead became the museum object not taken. What does the near-museum fate of a working domestic instrument tell the wiki's house-museum cluster — is the domestic interior's museum fate the exception (Gaudí's house, Freud's study) or the rule the occupant's attachment barely averts here?
"So much for 'place and occasion in design.'" Potter concedes the re-erected kitchen violates the place-occasion principle — yet calls it "at least a continuing one-off for its user." Does the kitchen's successful transplantation confirm Campos's nomadic-interior thesis (dwelling carried by transported interior elements, see liberated-interior) or falsify Potter's own situational doctrine — and can both be true (the situation interpreted, the structure transplanted)?
Ritual versus labour-saving. "There is nothing really instant about food… there is process, ritual, and continuity involved." Is the time-and-labour-saving kitchen's hidden cost precisely the loss of this process-ritual — the saved minutes being the point at which the everyday's continuity-agency (the taking of food) is designed out? Compare the wiki's Taylorism lineage (Beecher → Frankfurt → continuous kitchen): is Potter's the first full design counter-programme to the rationalized kitchen in this wiki?
The orientation cupboard. "From the angle of inclination, the kitchen interior is seen to win" — territory between kitchen and table decided item by item (marmalade "might store in the table cupboard"), "the logic of this would depend partly on familiarity of use." Is Potter's cupboard the smallest possible unit of the wiki's inside/outside dialectics — a boundary negotiated at the scale of preserves — and does the "familiarity of use" clause make the boundary's truth temporal rather than spatial?
The gender of the unsaid. The kitchen is designed "mainly for the use of his mother and her housekeeper/companion, who greatly enjoyed cooking" — two women cooks, no gender argument made. Does the wiki's gendered-kitchen register (Perec's mother's seven slots; Madigan & Munro's lounge/kitchen split) read Potter's clients as evidence that the values-kitchen presumes the gendered cook — or does "greatly enjoyed cooking" mark the difference between assigned labour and valued practice?