Kitchen Goals: What’s Possible When Your Architect Is Also a Professionally Trained Chef
I grew up in kitchens, lots of them, and big ones too. My grandfather owned a bakery in Boston, one with the largest brick oven in the entire city. My mom, one of the best chefs I’ve ever known, has owned two award-winning gourmet restaurants, a bakery, and a catering business. When the Italian Mob destroyed her modest food empire because she wouldn’t “play ball” (that’s a story for another day) we moved to Maui where she became the “opener” for a number of new hotel restaurants on on the island, writing menus, hiring staff, and training everyone.
My formative years were spent steeped in these fascinatingly busy and productive places. As a college student, I worked in my mom’s restaurant both in the front of house (dining room) and back of house (kitchen). And then there were the family dinners with relatives from all around New England. These were all day affairs where everyone contributed, ultimately sitting down together at a 20 foot long table, my grandfather at the head.
Parco Studio Founder, Ben Parco on Sabbatical at the San Francisco Cooking School
In my later years, after decades of architectural practice, I took a sabbatical from design and attended culinary school at the San Francisco Cooking School, just for the fun of it. There I filled in so many of the gaps in my culinary knowledge, polished my skills, came to understand the power of choosing the right tool for the job, and learned some really good kitchen habits. This final chapter in my cooking education got me thinking about home kitchens, how they work and how they don’t. What I came to realize on a deeper level than ever, is that while kitchens are important social gathering and entertaining spaces, they can also be the most technical spaces in our homes. When designed well, being in, moving through, and working within them can be an absolute joy. However, when they’re treated just like an average room, with not enough attention put on function, flow, widths, walking distances, they can fail to elevate the experience of cooking.
Flow + Function
On one level kitchens are very technical spaces, almost akin to a laboratory. They need to function really well or they can become tiresome to work in. Especially as a kitchen grows in size, it can become difficult to keep it from becoming a functional albatross. At the most basic level, the ease and function of a kitchen comes down to steps. Unlink most other parts of our lives, in the kitchen you really want to reduce your steps. A few extra steps to the refrigerator, sink, or pantry, can really add up over time, making cooking more of an exhausting chore than a joy.
There’s a kitchen planning concept known as the “kitchen work triangle.” Think of this as triangle drawn between the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator. That’s your work triangle. According to the kitchen triangle rule, these items should be laid out to loosely form a triangle, enabling you to perform the task of cooking with relative ease. According to the rule, each side of the triangle should measure no less than four feet and no more than nine feet and, ideally, the perimeter of the triangle should be no less than 13 feet and no more than 26 feet. In other words, not too small, and not too large, but just right.
The Kitchen Atrium in Our Oakland Hills Home
In the past, this rule of thumb has tended to work pretty well. However, as people have come to realize the importance of kitchen in their daily lives, kitchens have grown in size, at times past the point where the work triangle has any practical relevance.
Once a kitchen expands beyond a certain size, the concept of “work zones” takes over as the best organizing principal. Work zones allows for there to be a zone for say daily cooking, with perhaps another zone for baking, one for washing, one for entertaining, and maybe one for casual dining. Two different zones, like a daily cooking zone, and a baking zone might overlap at the refrigerator, where there’s a crossing of utility. But then some kitchens might have two refrigerators.
One could write a dissertation on this topic alone. As it turns out, kitchens can and often do function in very complex ways. Designing a great kitchen really comes down to anticipating how it can be make to support functionality, ease, and flow. If your designer hasn’t spent enough time in kitchens, imagining what’s right, playing out various scenarios, can be challenging. At the highest level, someone who really knows their way around a kitchen, begins to act as a choreographer, anticipating the movements that will be needed for various tasks, locating surfaces and equipment in a way that make practical sense and which make your kitchen sing. As the most expensive room in your home, this is not a place where you want to make any mistakes or miss any major opportunities. As they say in construction, “Measure twice, cut once.” This applies to the design of your kitchen more than any other space in your home.
Location, Location, Location
As the hub of many homes, locating your kitchen in the right spot of your house really matters. How it’s situated in the overall organizational layout of home can mean the difference between a home feeling comfortable, intimate, and connected, or just plain awkward. Because kitchens and kitchen activities have a gravitational pull of their own, often drawing people towards them, which rooms or spaces are immediately adjacent to the kitchen counts for a lot. These adjacencies will dictate how natural it feels to not only be in the kitchen but how natural it feels to be in any of its adjacent spaces. Many old homes suffer from the problem of the kitchen having been thought and located in the plan as a “back-of-house” function, separated from the social spaces of the home. These days, unless we’re talking about a serving or catering kitchen, this typically doesn’t work well for modern homes. A better way to think of the modern kitchen is more like a display kitchen in a high-end restaurant, one which might even have a chef’s table, where people can sit, watch, drink wine, and socialize, right there next to the all the action.
Indoor/Outdoor Use
In the places that we work: California, Hawaii, and the Western states, the indoor/outdoor potential for kitchens is great. We often think of the outdoor spaces adjacent to a kitchen as simply another room, albeit an outdoor room. These outdoor spaces might be outdoor dining areas, breakfast areas, fire pits, and the list goes on. One of these spaces could even be another kitchen, something as simple as a built-in barbecue or as integrated as a full-blown outdoor kitchen like those offered by New Age.
Beyond the kinds of outdoor spaces that one might normally expect, as a chef, one of my favorite outdoor functions to have near the kitchen is an herb garden. In permaculture circles, this is known as Zone 1. Having fresh herbs right outside your kitchen door elevates not only the experience of cooking but your culinary outcomes as well.
Light + Air
Does your kitchen get morning, midday, or afternoon light? With the kitchen as the heart of many homes getting the kitchen’s location right is a very big deal. Beyond the consideration of daylighting, there’s artificial lighting. I think of lighting in a kitchen as wanting to be a layered approach. Work surfaces should get the most light but the kitchen’s ambient lighting matters too. And if you’ve got a dine-in element to your kitchen, you will probably want to consider some kind of decorative pendant fixture. Layer these different kinds of lighting together, give them all dimmable controls, and you’re on your way to a beautiful, highly functional space.
LED lights have become the norm in new construction and this is great news for cooks because these fixtures offer control over not only lighting levels but also what we call color temperature, whether lighting appears warm, cool, or perfectly neutral. How food looks is part of the cooking and dining experience and so having this level of control over all of it really is one of the treats of building a new kitchen. The right lighting can make your meals look magazine perfect.
Access to fresh air can be a very nice way to open up a kitchen and is a good way to keep your kitchen smelling fresh. Of course, if you’re doing any amount of true cooking, you’ll also need mechanical ventilation in the form of a hood. Range hoods come in all shapes, sizes, and powers. Striking the right balance between a hood that truly does the job without feeling like you’re in a noisy commercial kitchen is important. In my view, hoods should cover the cooking surface entirely and have controls to dial the fan speed up or down. Getting back to light for a moment, the best of these hoods also have heat resistant spot lighting designed to illuminate the cooking surface.
In addition to overhead hoods, there are also what are referred to as downdraft hoods. These are sleek panels which rise up out of the cooking surface to pull air from the side. They look great and eliminate the need for an overhead hood but truly don’t do the job anywhere near as well as their overhead counterparts. If you don’t do a lot of high-heat cooking, these can be a nice, clean alternative to a bulkier overhead model.
Storage, Technology + Surfaces
As the closest thing to a laboratory space in your home, the storage, technology, and surfaces that you choose for your kitchen matter a lot. They each have knock-on impact to maintenance, hygiene, and utility. Truth be told, this is almost another dissertation topic. Suffice it to say, you want to select storage that works for your style of cooking, the way you like to store cookware, tools, dinnerware, and pantry items.
Storage
For instance, I like keeping all of my dry pantry items in glass “Ball” mason jars. These keep bugs and moisture out and don’t have my ingredients sitting around in plastic. Since I like jars, I have drawers in my kitchen instead of cabinets. To get at my rice, flour, etc., I simply slide open a drawer and pluck out the item I need. Even if it’s at the back of the drawer, I have no problem reaching everything. With labels on all the lids, it’s easy find everything.
Having been brought up in professional kitchens, I like having the ability to pluck dishes off a shelf as I “plate” a meal. For this reason, I keep my dinnerware on open shelves. I cook enough that I’m not worried about dust build-up. Besides, I love seeing my Heath Ceramics dinnerware there on the shelf and not behind a cabinet door.
These are just two small examples of how one home chef might like things a certain way while another might prefer the opposite. If this kind of thing is important to you, we go through a rigorous “micro-programming” exercise in order to get the storage in your kitchen just the way you like it.
Technology
Kitchens are filled with technology and much of it is getting better each year. Choosing the right fixture and appliances can have a huge impact on both the look and feel of your kitchen and its functionality. Innovations in cooking, washing, and refrigeration, among other categories abound.
We’re all accustomed to dishwashers but like drawer storage, there are now drawer dishwashers. These are compact, under-counter appliances which are easier to load and unload and because they are smaller than a traditional dishwasher, dishes tend not to sit for days with food drying on them.
As building codes move towards all-electric, induction (magnetic) cooktops are becoming more popular. These ranges look like a glass-topped electric range but aren’t hot to the touch unless there’s a conductive piece of metal cookware there to heat up. Like glass-top electric stoves, these ranges are super easy to keep clean, the advantage with induction being the increased level of control. Most induction ranges allow you to not only control the Level but the Wattage of each burner. These two “dials” ultimately give you a very high degree of instantaneous temperature control.
Surfaces
Finally there are the surfaces, with so many materials to choose from. Surfaces in a kitchen matter beyond aesthetics. Different materials and their particular attributes matter in a kitchen. There are a whole range of natural stone options, composite stone-like surfaces, generically referred to as “solid surface,” stainless steel sheet or plate, copper, butcher block, vinyl sheet, diatomaceous earth, and the list goes on. Each has its own benefits, downsides, and special use.
And There’s More…
Truly, I could go on for days about this topic. There’s knife and cookware storage, troughs for oils, vinegars, and sauces, trash and composting, and other tools that you want within reach. Each of these elements should be considered as key instruments in the orchestra that is making a meal.
At Parco Studio, we find kitchens to be some of the most energetic, fascinating, and joy-filled spaces that we work in, and we obsess over not only the details but on the overall experience.
Beauty + Flow -> Joy + Delight
Ultimately, the design of a custom home and the kitchen/s within it, comes down to creating more delight and joy in our lives. We support greater degrees of joy and delight through the creating spaces of beauty and flow. Whether it’s a beam of dappled light streaming in through a well-placed skylight or the way in which a well-designed kitchen creates a sense of ease and flow, we orchestrate these elements of space so as to uplift our clients and their families. A space that is both beautiful and easy to use, engenders greater degrees of relaxation. It is in these times that we we are more able to drop into the moment and be with one another fully. These types of connection supported by these kinds of spaces bring us happiness — and who couldn’t use more of that?
What’s Possible for Your Kitchen Design?
Whether you are designing and building a custom home or planning a major renovation of your current home, chance are the kitchen is a top priority to get just right.
As both an architect and a trained chef, I am happy to admit I obsess over the details to make the kitchen a space of joy and delight in every home I design.
And, I’d love to discuss the possibilities for your home. Let’s talk!
