Couldn't agree more with this:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16546884%5E25658,00.html
High-class kitchens are no place for steak and three veg
Guy Allenby
September 10, 2005
ASK any architect or interior designer and they'll tell you that the finer a kitchen's joinery, the more expensive the benchtop and the pricier the European appliances, the less likely the kitchen is going to be used.
Call it kitchen use ratio (or KUR for short).
New kitchens with a high KUR are the ones with two parallel ovens, two dishwashers, hectares of stone benchtop, a double-door fridge that's integrated into the joinery, cabinets that cost as much as an imported sports car (and are nearly as immaculately
finished), drawers that snap smoothly shut with a vacuum-assisted push and enough uplights, downlights and task lights to create the sort of mood you want on the stage-set that the modern kitchen has become.
High KUR kitchens typically see little or no activity during the working week, because breakfast is a cuppa and a pastry on the way to work, lunch is in the office and dinner is at a restaurant, run-of-the-mill takeaway, or a reheated "homecooked" prepacked gourmet meal from the local deli.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, the low KUR kitchen (the one with the single oven, laminated benchtops, simple lighting and a single-door fridge) may not see substantially more action these days than its more pricey cousin, but at least its owners don't have to perpetuate the myth that they do. Or put it another way: having a kitchen with a high KUR is a bit like having a car that can go 0-100km/h in 4.5 seconds - sooner or later your friends are going to expect to see what it's really made of.
So it's likely that the high KUR kitchen lies dormant for 95 per cent of the time, but it's also highly likely that every now and then it does get a serious workout when you entertain, to justify its existence.
Then again, the primary function of the cutting-edge contemporary kitchen was never as a place to cook food.
A couple of months ago in The Weekend Australian Magazine (Crowded House, June 11-12) I had a crack at charting the key changes that our homes have undergone in the last 20 years, with one of the important ones being the shift from the hidden to the "showcase" kitchen.
As interior designer Kirsten Stanisich pointed out, in the old days our formal living room - or the "good room" - used to take pride of place in the Australian home. These days, she said, "those emotions have simply been transferred to the kitchen". In the "good room" of old, it was a matter of pride that the lounge suite still looked just as new as it did when it was bought five years before, and that the coffee table hardly ever had a steaming coffee mug sitting on it.
That was entirely the point.
The room wasn't a place to use, so much as a place you could afford not to use.
Just as many of our new-fashioned, hard-wearing reconstituted stone benchtops have often had very little food chopped or spilled on them, there really are ovens out there that have never actually had anything baked in them (it's true). Most of those double-door fridges are only half full.
The simple fact is that at some time in the recent past our kitchens have changed from functional places to prepare meals, to a cross between status symbol, a home's key selling point, and the number-one place in the home that we show off our sense of style.
Forget net income: KUR is the key national indicator of a household's wealth.
[email protected]
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16546884%5E25658,00.html
High-class kitchens are no place for steak and three veg
Guy Allenby
September 10, 2005
ASK any architect or interior designer and they'll tell you that the finer a kitchen's joinery, the more expensive the benchtop and the pricier the European appliances, the less likely the kitchen is going to be used.
Call it kitchen use ratio (or KUR for short).
New kitchens with a high KUR are the ones with two parallel ovens, two dishwashers, hectares of stone benchtop, a double-door fridge that's integrated into the joinery, cabinets that cost as much as an imported sports car (and are nearly as immaculately
finished), drawers that snap smoothly shut with a vacuum-assisted push and enough uplights, downlights and task lights to create the sort of mood you want on the stage-set that the modern kitchen has become.
High KUR kitchens typically see little or no activity during the working week, because breakfast is a cuppa and a pastry on the way to work, lunch is in the office and dinner is at a restaurant, run-of-the-mill takeaway, or a reheated "homecooked" prepacked gourmet meal from the local deli.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, the low KUR kitchen (the one with the single oven, laminated benchtops, simple lighting and a single-door fridge) may not see substantially more action these days than its more pricey cousin, but at least its owners don't have to perpetuate the myth that they do. Or put it another way: having a kitchen with a high KUR is a bit like having a car that can go 0-100km/h in 4.5 seconds - sooner or later your friends are going to expect to see what it's really made of.
So it's likely that the high KUR kitchen lies dormant for 95 per cent of the time, but it's also highly likely that every now and then it does get a serious workout when you entertain, to justify its existence.
Then again, the primary function of the cutting-edge contemporary kitchen was never as a place to cook food.
A couple of months ago in The Weekend Australian Magazine (Crowded House, June 11-12) I had a crack at charting the key changes that our homes have undergone in the last 20 years, with one of the important ones being the shift from the hidden to the "showcase" kitchen.
As interior designer Kirsten Stanisich pointed out, in the old days our formal living room - or the "good room" - used to take pride of place in the Australian home. These days, she said, "those emotions have simply been transferred to the kitchen". In the "good room" of old, it was a matter of pride that the lounge suite still looked just as new as it did when it was bought five years before, and that the coffee table hardly ever had a steaming coffee mug sitting on it.
That was entirely the point.
The room wasn't a place to use, so much as a place you could afford not to use.
Just as many of our new-fashioned, hard-wearing reconstituted stone benchtops have often had very little food chopped or spilled on them, there really are ovens out there that have never actually had anything baked in them (it's true). Most of those double-door fridges are only half full.
The simple fact is that at some time in the recent past our kitchens have changed from functional places to prepare meals, to a cross between status symbol, a home's key selling point, and the number-one place in the home that we show off our sense of style.
Forget net income: KUR is the key national indicator of a household's wealth.
[email protected]
