Essay

Photo: Villeroy & Boch

The new kitchens have got about as much in common with granny’s range and mother’s fitted kitchen as a washing machine has with a washboard. Left to their own devices in one of today’s sleek cooking temples, our grandmothers probably couldn’t even find a coffee spoon: Where on earth are the drawers? Immaculate, homogenous cupboard surfaces as far as the eye can see, but not a handle in sight. And the sideboard drawer that used to keep getting stuck? These days, thanks to push-to-open technology, all you have to do is give the handy organiser a gentle tap and it glides open, obligingly revealing its interior. Aha, there we go ... that must be the cooker. Well, the outlined rings look a bit like four hotplates, anyway – at least, that is, if the kitchen hasn’t yet been fitted with a latest-generation induction hob that automatically recognises which random patch of the glass surface the pot happens to be standing on. But what’s happened to the oven? And you haven’t got a sink at all, poor child. So where do you wash the dishes?

Indeed, Granny Bess would find it almost impossible to get her bearings in a modern kitchen. And not just because of new cooking appliances like the microwave and steam oven, both of them niftily fitted at chest height into shelves or cupboards that are more reminiscent of a living room wall unit than a work area. The classic equipment has changed beyond all recognition as well: digitised operating functions instead of big rotary switches, pull-out larders instead of pantries, cooking and baking split into ergonomically sensible, separate zones. And then there are the fittings: with single-lever mixers, pull-out spray taps, toggle buttons for boiling-hot or carbonated drinking water, for splashing or gently flowing dishwater, even aglow with colour if the fancy takes you! In many a kitchen, you don’t stand a chance of finding the dishwasher behind the swish panel, the covered sink or the fold-out, height-adjustable or extendable extractor fan unless you know your way around. The entire minimalist design of cooking islands and wall units is making the kitchen as we used to know it disappear completely.