The Unsociable Kitchen (Kitchens #3)
Why are so many of our kitchens so unsociable? Lucy meets Johnny Grey, a kitchen designer who’s been fighting for decades to make kitchens a place for leisure not work, and Katie Pennick, a disability campaigner whose work has changed the face of London transport – but who still can’t cook in her own kitchen. Plus Sean Warmington-Wan reflects on the unsociable kitchen in his shared London house.
Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode, Sean Warmington-Wan, Katie Pennick and Johnny Grey.
Buy the Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations!
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
Cover collage by Stephanie Hartman
If you’ve enjoyed what you heard on this episode, or generally on Lecker, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening, and telling a friend about it!
And if you’ve really enjoyed listening to this episode, or are a big fan of the podcast in general already, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT - PRODUCED BY NADIA MEDHI
[0.00]:
Lucy: Hi, this is Lucy! Before this episode starts I just wanted to say thanks you for all your lovely comments so far about Kitchens the series, I’m so happy you’re enjoying it. So, just wanted to say that if you’d like to support the work that Lecker does - like this series - you can join as a patron for just £3 a month, and that money will help fund and cover production costs. Find out more at patreon.com/leckerpodcast.
[Sound of gas hob clicking, then bursting into flame]
Research by the Times in 2019 discovered that a staggering 9 out of 10 rented houses don’t have a living room. And what this means is that so often the only communal space in these homes is the kitchen.
[music begins]
SWW: Of my friends… I mean we all, we all live in shared houses….there’s like four of us or like four or five people in one house share in one kitchen, one bathroom, if you’re lucky one living room
Sean Warmington-Wan lives in a shared house in south east London. This sort of living set up has long been considered fairly normal for people in their 20s like Sean is but the cost of housing - not just to buy, but to rent smaller places like 1 beds and 2 beds - has risen so drastically over the past decades that the number of people sharing in their 30s, 40s, 50s has doubled in recent years. The Office for National Statistics doesn’t measure the number of houseshares specifically, but they do measure what they call Multiple Family Households. Multiple Family Households still only make up 1% of households in the UK - but they’re also the fastest growing type. This definition can encompass friends of similar ages sharing, but also multiple generations of families living together as the name suggests - and that’s something we’re also seeing a lot more of these days. And for these households that fall outside of a particular make up, living with a traditional fitted kitchen - particularly when you don’t have a living room - can be a challenge.
[music fades out]
There are some people where that actually really works because they all like to sit down and eat together, they might all be on the same schedule and it all turns into this sort of pseudo nuclear family thing, like “Oh, we all cook together in the evening, one of us will take turns to cook!”. For them it works great because you’re still, you’re still imitating that sort of nuclear family-ness. One person can be in the kitchen cooking and they can cook quite easily for four or five people. My house...that doesn’t work.
[Music begins]
SWW: Lunchtime in particular because three quarters of us are in during the day, most days we’ll all cook lunch. In the evening, we might, like, one of us might get takeaway, or we might share a takeaway or whatever. But lunchtime, most of us like to cook. If someone’s cooking in there I won’t try and do anything else because there’s one surface here which you can prepare vegetables on, there’s one surface here which you’ll put the pan lids or the cooking utensils when you’re actually doing the cooking. If it takes 45 minutes for someone to cook lunch and then eat it and clear up, that doesn’t really work for three people, so it does just mean that if, like, any one of us has somewhere to be in the afternoon, we will just need to be cooking at the same time. And the question is like, why don’t, why don’t we cook the same meals, and share like and cook the same. And it’s like, well, I have a different diet to the other flatmate, he, he makes loads of like Italian food, pastas, and like, I cook...weird food…you know, it’s just like, food one or two of my flatmates wouldn’t eat day to day. I’ll cook, like, a steamed fish. Like a Cantonese steamed sea bass, or whatever, and it’s not what he’d choose to eat for dinner most of the time.
I really like cooking for people and in my kitchen, you’re facing the wall, and there is no space for anyone else in that kitchen really. I mean they can stand in the doorway, or by the sink, and both of those are slightly behind me, so I’m cooking and I’m like, turning round and like, trying to speak a bit more but actually, I’m kind of concentrating and I can’t keep doing that.
Yeah, it’s not a particularly sociable place at all. At all.
Lucy: So the one communal space in a rented house isn’t even designed to be sociable? The fitted kitchen was originally designed for a certain type of household. It deliberately rejected the idea of cooking and cleaning taking place in a room where the whole family spent time together, and it established the idea of a separate room as a workplace. But things are different now. Shouldn’t we be building kitchens that fit their users, or are flexible enough to work for different types of households, rather than forcing people to shape their lives around an unsuitable, unsociable kitchen?
[Hob clicks and bursts into flame again, the noises of the kitchen intensify; cupboard doors are shut, cutlery is rattled, pots are clashed, a collage of voices talking about kitchens begins to speak over jaunty lounge music. Each speaker is separated by a dash].
[5:00] You go in the back door - It’s a really small kitchen, it’s tiny - It’s like a tiny little box - Gas hob - So you have the stove - Worktop - Counter - Sink - A small fridge - Underneath the draining board was the gas fridge - If more than one person’s in there, everyone starts to get a bit flustered. That’s the general vibe.
This is kitchens, a podcast series by Lecker, about the most important room in the home. I’m Lucy Dearlove.
They left out any element of human emotion and emotional intelligence in what people needed from kitchens. - This kitchen is not, it’s not suitable for me, it doesn’t enable me to cook. - Kitchens are more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why? Why is that?
**********************
Episode 3 - The Unsociable Kitchen
Katie Pennick: I like recipes that are low effort or low, like, physical effort,
The standard fitted kitchen isn’t just unsociable because it was designed for a certain type of household. It’s also unsociable - and unsuitable in many cases - because it was designed for a certain kind of body.
[Music starts]
I like to have minimal movement. So I love big bubbling pots, that's my favourite thing, if, just a big pot and just throw everything in and be stirring it and I feel I feel like, you know, a witch with cauldron and you know, like, I'm cooking for a big, you know, family and you know, everyone's gonna come and sit around my big bubbling pot that I love that that's my, that is the best cooking vibe, I think for me.
This is Katie Pennick. She lives in North London with her partner, Alex and her two frankly adorable cats, Felt and Noodle.
Sorry, sorry, shall we take them and put them in a different room?
No honestly it’s fine! I think we’ll just nod to the fact that Noodle is attacking the sofa, that’s fine. [Katie laughs].
The flat they all live in has a kitchen that is pretty typical for lots of London flats - it’s part of their main living space.
So you can see a very sort of standard kitchen setup, where you've got a corner or two corners of a room that are connected with a counter that's about I suppose for a standing person would be like, dunno, waist high? Belly high? I actually have no idea how tall people are or like, where it comes up to on your body. Would you say that's waist height?
LD: Well, I would bet you any money that that counter is 36 inches high, because every single counter in the world, just about, is 36 inches, three feet high. So yeah, I guess, it's optimized, isn't it to be...a standing person has elbow room to chop on.
Exactly. And for me, that's my shoulders, it comes up to my, my shoulder blades and my collarbone.
Katie uses a wheelchair, so the whole idea of a kitchen optimised to a standing person is completely useless to her. And what could be more unsociable than a kitchen that doesn’t allow the person who lives there to cook in it?
I don't cook in the kitchen. The kitchen is not where the cooking happens. Or it's at least where the final stage of the cooking happens. For everything, for all of the prep, I do it on my table which is in the middle of my sort of living space which is at the right height for me as I'm sat in my wheelchair, the counters of the kitchen are far too high. It means that if I ever wanted to chop something, you know, my elbows would be up here, you know, you can't get any leverage to chop something.
The social model of disability is just a way of thinking about disability. And it suggests, it says that you are disabled by the world around you. So, you're not disabled by any kind of medical diagnosis that you have, you know, anything going on with your body or your mind. It's not something to do with the individual. It's something to do with the environment. You're disabled by the barriers that exist in society, in the built environment, in the world around you.
We are all only as able as society enables us to be. It's really important to remember that we all have needs, every single human being on the planet has needs, the only difference is that your needs, non-disabled people's needs are accommodated, they are met every single day through through everything that you do through all of the world, the world has been built to [10:00] accommodate your needs. And my needs aren't accommodated, you know, my needs aren't met. And that's what makes me disabled. And yeah, my needs are labeled, as you know, additional, right or special, or whatever word you want to use.
Pretty much everything in a standard fitted kitchen is built with a standing person in mind - a person who can move easily around a space on foot. So if you’re physically unable to stand, or you can’t stand for long periods of time, or you’re visually impaired or you have another disability that might impact how you move around a confined space that’s built for non-disabled people, then immediately it’s very clear that the kitchen just isn’t designed for you.
And because of how centred the fitted kitchen is in our understanding of food and cooking, this inaccessibility applies not just to the kitchen, but also to written recipes and ways of cooking.
Lucy: When you make a new recipe Do you, do you plan your movements before you start?
KP: Yeah, yeah, I read it. Like I read the recipe fully. And I think, what am I going to do where. It is usually that I will start at my kitchen table, chopping and preparing everything, and then move over to the hob. But I do definitely when I'm reading a recipe, I think, how am I going to do this practically? Where am I going to be doing for this? What order will I do it in that's another thing I often do things in a different order to what the recipe will tell me to because the recipe is written in a way to optimize time. But I'm not optimizing time, I'm optimizing energy. And I want to do things that will require the least amount of movements. Any time I'm cooking it, I always start by getting everything I need out and ready. And like setting up my workspace. So I have my, my kitchen table in the middle of the living area, and I will get out my chopping board, my knife, and then a few bowls, to put in the things that I've been chopping.
I wanted to understand how much work Katie has to do to adapt recipes so they work better for her.
KP: And for this recipe, all I need to chop is a bunch of spring onions and pak choi
So I asked her to talk me through exactly how she makes one of her favourite recipes she eats all the time at home. It’s a quick and easy noodle recipe from a really popular cookery site, and then I cooked it myself exactly as it’s written, in my own kitchen
Lucy: step one, heat a large frying pan or wok over a high heat, I’ve got my large frying pan, high heat [beeping hob]. Squeeze the sausages out of their skins, straight into the pan [sizzling].
KP: I'll also be making the sauce in a bowl
LD: Oh yeah, so once I’ve done that, I need to wash my hands, so I’ve got to go over to the sink [running water]
KP: It is tahini. It's soy sauce, it is chili oil and some like cold water.
LD: Ok, I need to add the five spice powder, oh I should have got this out before because, oh there we go
KP: So I've got everything out: spoons, bowls, knife, chopping board, everything's ready.
LD: [Dishwasher cutlery rack rattling] You see I’m a very disorganised cook.
KP: And this is important for me because I don't like to keep going back and forth to different areas like going to the cupboard and going to the you know, whatever, I can just sit there and do it all in one go, which is really nice for me. Chop the spring onion, chop the pak choi, put that in a bowl ready to go.
LD: Leave to fry for five minutes, stirring occasionally to break up the meat until crisp, so we’ve got to fry these guys until they’re crisp
KP: Oh, also sausages, pork sausages, which you take the skin off and like crumble them up into small little bits. Do that, set that aside
LD: Meanwhile, slice the pak choi and separate the leaves, finely slice the spring onions. Ok, stirring my sausages. So I’m having to stir-, I’m actually on the, I’m going to cut my pak choi on the work surface next to my hob so I just have to step over, but you know, that’s a movement every time.
KP: Alex usually does this bit, big wok on the hob, fry the sausages in five spice. And then we add in udon noodles
LD: And then the next thing I’ve got to do according to the recipe is make my sauce
[15:00] KP: add the greens from your bowl, keep frying
LD: And now I add the noodles. Alright, so noodles are in, the pak choi stalks and sauce are going in the pan [chopping noises[
KP: and then add your sauce from the other bowl. And it's just done.
LD: I mean yeah, that was really quick but a lot of moving around!
It's how I do everything and cooking is another example of living in a very inaccessible world and having to find a different way to do things. And it's second nature to me its just I, I, if I'm presented with a situation, and I think, Okay, well, I'm gonna do it this way, because that's the way that works better for me.
You might have noticed in the process Katie described so in detail that there are certain aspects of cooking - like frying, for example- that her partner Alex usually does. This is such a central thing to this whole idea of a sociable kitchen for me. Why are we so focused on a kitchen being efficiently and functionally designed for one person to cook in it, when for so many households it would make much more sense to design it for multiple people to be able to cook in it all at once?
I very much see that the involvement of others in cooking, like a very integral part of cooking and the cooking process. And that doesn't make you any less of a chef, it doesn't make you any less talented as...like, if you need assistance while cooking, from whoever that might be, from your partner, from your flatmates, from your personal assistants if you have them. You know, whatever it is, get people involved in cooking and ensure that like, you are, your needs are being met and that you are supported to do the cooking.
So I think that's another part of it. It's not just about the physical infrastructure of the kitchen. And trying to make that as accessible as possible and trying to widen that out to be as inclusive as possible. It's also about widening out cooking and what cooking means and the idea of cooking to be as inclusive as possible. And for many people that will mean needing assistance and that's fine.
As Katie explains here, there’s also an element to this about what is expected of disabled people in a domestic setting.
When I go to the shops, just literally just going down the street, going to the supermarket buying, you know, some vegetables, and someone will come up to me in an aisle and be like, You're so brave. You're so brave. You're such an inspiration. I'm honestly I'm so inspired. I'm like, by what? This like avocado, what you're talking about, I’m literally just doing the grocery shopping. I know people aren't being malicious by it. And I know people mean well, but unfortunately, it does reveal that you your bar for what disabled people can do is so low that you think me here with like my bag of carrots is brave. I mean, come on. Now, let's just step back a bit. This But that's it, you know, you learn that I've, you know, I was I was born with my impairment. I've been a wheelchair user my whole life. And I've always experienced that I've always experienced those attitudes have always experienced people having such a low expectation of me. And anything I did was like, ah, remarkable. When people feel sorry for you and express that pity all the time, it's really hard to not internalize that and think, ah, no, I guess I can't do anything.
The prevailing kind of attitude is not that disabled people would like care for others, you know, cook for other people. So yeah, it's not just that I'm not expected to cook for myself, I'm not expected to, like cook for my partner, or, and cook a nice meal for my family. That is so contrary to what the negative kind of attitudes and stigma is. And I think the kitchen has really played a big part in that of like, excluding disabled people from that kind of that section of life, the kitchen being kind of the, the homey heart of a, of a, house of a of a life, you know, where the, where the food is made, that nourishes all the family members. And, and it's, you know, it's very, like, what's the word like giving, it's very, like caregiving. And I yeah, I don't see that disabled people are kind of meant to be in that I feel the image there [20:00] is that the disabled person, or people are, you know, at the table, they're going to have the food given to them.
And it's also very difficult as a disabled woman, to kind of face this really weird, like, contrary expectations, like quite mutually exclusive different expectations. Because the kind of this gender role, this like, very patriarchal gender role is that the woman is the, the caregiver, the woman provides for the family, the woman, the woman's places in the kitchen, the woman is meant to cook for her partner and cook for her family. So on one hand, I've got that kind of in mind, and that, that kind of being being learnt or being fed to me. But then on the other hand, I have this image of like, the disabled person is fully dependent on others, and like, needs a caregiver, right to cook for me, and, and doesn't, doesn't have any role in providing for anyone else. And that's really weird, and really hard to balance. A lot of disability theorists have talked about this before is this idea of like rolelessness? So where do I fit into this, like, one on one hand, I'm being told that my place is in the kitchen, on the other I’m being told, I mean, physically can't get in?
So I think quite a few disabled women would agree with me on this as feeling like, I know that I know that that idea is sexist, as in a woman's place is in the kitchen, right? I know that that’s sexist, I know that we're meant to be rejecting that. But I want to do that because, because that's, that is really hard to explain. It's like, that is classically what is expected of women. And I am a woman. So that applies to me too, even though it's like really reductive and regressive and bad. It's you still kind of yeah, it's strange way you just want to be a part of that.
The world has been built for a very particular body and mind, this is not suitable for so many people. And so that's kind of the premise behind inclusive design and universal design, which is, why aren't we building a world that works for everyone? Rather than this one very particular body.
[Lecker Kitchens music plays]
Inclusive design is available to disabled people, if they have the money to pay for it. There is, in theory, assistance available in the form of the Disabled Facilities Grant which will pay for adaptations to meet owners’ or tenants’ needs. Katie told me about someone she knew who had successfully applied for a Disabled Facilities Grant, having finally after 7 years been allocated a social housing property that actually met her needs. She had an accessible kitchen installed with key features like...it had to be suitable for navigating in a power wheelchair, that included being able to clear under the sink so that the person using the wheelchair could wash up, it included oven and cupboard design at sitting level so the person in the wheelchair could cook for their family and put things away and everything else. It also included lighting that was suitable for people with visual impairments. The idea was that the kitchen would simultaneously meet the needs of everyone living in the house, not just the needs of the non-disabled people. And that means that no-one feels excluded, everyone’s needs are met and being in the kitchen is egalitarian and democratic. Everyone is caring for each other – no mean feat and one that so much kitchen design completely fails on.
JOHNNY: For me, the future of kitchens is really about turning the central Island into a series of, if you like working tables, getting everybody around the table to do lots of different things at the same time is one of my missions.
So sociability, facing into the room, you cannot have a conversation with anybody if your back is facing the room. So cooking devices, stoves against the wall, sorry, change it around.
The kitchen design that the vast majority of us can afford if we’re even lucky enough to own a house, or live in a house where we have control over the kitchen, involves consulting a representative of a particular company that sells kitchen units, and working out what arrangement of their quite inflexible [25:00] fixed size products fits best in the space that you have. And this doesn’t always work – like, I got a new kitchen a couple of years ago and we just had to rule out IKEA because I have a U shaped kitchen, it runs all the way around three walls, and because it’s a small kitchen, the depth of IKEA cabinets meant there was a tiny space in the middle of the kitchen, I mean it just wasn’t going to work. [Loungey music starts] And if you want something more than this? You have to go bespoke, and that’s what legendary kitchen designer Johnny Grey has devoted his life’s work to.
JG: I was at some party in a cocktail party in Fulham. This very posh man came up to me and said, so what do you do? And I said, Well, yeah, I design kitchens. And he rolled his eyes at me. He said, Well, what does that involve? You know, because in those days designing kitchens was really a non-starter, you know, there was either placing boxes or well, nobody, nobody ever thought about designing kitchens really, I don't think. And a journalist from Sunday Times overheard this. She came up to me and she said, I'd like to write a story about your ideas.
This was published on, I think it was the 10th of August 1980. And as it happens, I was in bed with my then girlfriend for the first time ever, and we got married four years later. But we went down to the newsagent and bought this newspaper. The title of this piece was “Why this awful fixation with fitted kitchens?” And it was the most amazing moment for me, probably one of the most amazing moments in my career.
And I think I had something like three or four thousand inquiries. On the Monday morning, I had five people outside the front door of our little, tiny house in Kensington, saying, could you design me a kitchen, I mean, it was incredible.
“We’ve had systems and scientifics and rigid modernity, what we need now is to make kitchens more habitable. A kitchen should be a place of hospitality, not just a machine to prepare food.” That’s one of the quotes that is attributed to Johnny from the article that hit such a nerve with the British public.
But why did it have this effect? Johnny thinks it was a reaction to the lack of homeliness in fitted kitchens at the time.
JG: I'm not going to be at all nationalistic about it, but the only really successful fitted kitchen companies were the German ones, and they really worked, you know, they rebuilt Germany really fast after the war by systemising, kitchen cabinetry, and appliances, you know, and, and fine, but they left out any element of human emotion, and emotional intelligence in the way that kitchens what people need different kitchens.
[Music ends]
This understanding of the importance of human emotion in the kitchen makes sense when you hear stories about Johnny’s childhood and formative years. Sociable kitchens were at the centre of his family life - and from a very young age he was encouraged to actively start shaping them.
[Music: Jeremy Warmsley - Jacques]
JG: My mother had a small cottage kitchen in a little house, er, cottage she bought in...just outside Petersfield in 1956. It was freezing cold, because the back door of the house, which was actually the main door of the house, came into this kitchen, and we were always cold in this kitchen.
One day she said, would I build a wall to just basically keep the draft from the backdoor coming into the kitchen, and we turn it into a nice little cozy room. And that was almost my first ever woodwork project.
I spent many hours in the freezing cold building this pine kind of wall and built a little door with it. And she loved it. And she gave me all this enthusiasm. Children have this lovely kind of resilience, I think. And good parenting is partly about, you know, making children feel they can achieve things, probably that they can't, but they think they can.
And there was another sociable family kitchen that had a huge influence on Johnny’s approach: this was a kitchen belonging to his aunt, the food writer Elizabeth David.
JG: When you came into her kitchen, she had three pine dressers, and a pine cupboard. Her kitchen was an unfitted kitchen really.
Johnny built Elizabeth David a sink unit and table to go along with her other freestanding kitchen furniture. When Johnny and I first spoke on the phone about this series last year we talked quite a lot about Elizabeth David’s kitchen, and one of the things he said about it really stuck with me.
“It wasn’t super efficient but by god did you want to be in it, y’know!”
The kitchen wasn’t perfect, and even Elizabeth David herself complained about its functionality and the lack of light, but it was a room that drew people in and people wanted to be in there.
These experiences, along with Johnny’s studies at the Architectural Association and the interesting portfolio of work he was starting to build up after he graduated, started to crystallize into something really unique in terms of kitchen design. On a very elemental level he rejected many key design factors of the fitted kitchen that was growing in popularity then - and as we still know it today. [30:00] Things like - only having closed cupboards, with everything shut away.
Food is beautiful. Think of all those incredible fruits and things that don't need to go in the fridge. Why don't you put them in bowls? And that's not my original observation. That was my aunt's. As you squeeze in the door, she had bowls, these lovely white Pillivuyt bowls full of lovely things. Somebody might have come into her shop and have given her some walnuts or some figs or and she will put those out for a day or two. And immediately as you come in the door, you know you're in a kitchen. Yes!
The clinical efficiency surrounded by fitted kitchens. And the obsession and the use of by the advertising world of basically using hygiene to make people feel ashamed of their kitchens, their traditional kitchens. And by having things that were fitted, so there was no dirt in the corners. And there was no you know, no space for kind of any sort of, I don't know, homely element, it was all about being clean, and slick.
Now, the corners of a room define the space. So if you build up cabinetry into every corner, you lose your sense of how would I put it, of a room of the opportunity to furnish, and historically bits of your own things that you found are really important ways of triggering off belonging. And you can't do that in a kitchen. If you've got cabinetry everywhere.
So one of my philosophies was to minimize the amount of eye level cupboards. If you think about the fitted kitchen, you think they're planned efficiently. They're not because you have a counter, you have a gap. You have a high level cupboard. The eye level cupboard is half depth. That's not proper storage and he can't get into it and you can't put doors on the front that you can line with small jars and, and packets. So actually if you do a proper pantry, a pantry saves you a lot of unnecessary, expensive and annoying storage at high level, which doesn't really work that well. And people want to be able to customize the wall space, it's not just about the cabinetry. So if someone's got photographs of their family or old paintings or whatever it is, or they just want to have a really beautiful piece of artwork, It’s the spirit of the furnished room entering into the the core design of the kitchen.
In the mid 80s, Johnny started working with furniture company Smallbone and together they released a range of freestanding kitchen furniture called The Unfitted Kitchen. And the ideas he’d been working on for years about how to reimagine the kitchen were further developed.
When we were developing the Unfitted Kitchen, this creative director, Peter Shepherd, was helpful to me because he started to sort of look at it almost in a birds eye view and he said, Johnny, look, what you’re really doing here a lot of the time is creating micro work tops. And we came up with this phrase together called dedicated work surfaces and this is a really good principle of kitchen planning. So, what you need to do to get efficiency is not just have long counters where you can do stuff, you want to have dedicated areas where you do one or two particular things and then you can position tools around it, you can position that in a particular place. If you think about this, what you want to do is have somebody prepare food, really without having to move, so when you stretch your arms out you’ve got 1.5m or 5 foot or whatever it is. Try and have your core stove and cooking area within 5 feet, and then you’ve really only got one step to go. Now, that applies to a big or a small kitchen.
Another of Johnny ’s key principles in his designs is what he calls Soft Geometry . It’s a rejection of angles and sharp edges. L shaped cabinets? A square kitchen island in the middle of the room? The Working Triangle? Think again.
You wayfind by basically being threatened by sharp objects and having a sense of being unthreatened. So, if you have sharp corners in the middle of a room you are alerted to that. Even though they aren’t a very big threat, they’re there. So imagine you’re walking down a tunnel lets say, I don’t know, four, five foot wide and it’s lined with sharp rocks. You behave. You walk very carefully. Your brain doesn’t allow you to think about very much else apart from not getting hurt because flight responses take over from other brain functions. But imagine doing the same thing, only it’s lined with silk upholstery. You’re wanting to touch it, you don’t even think about it.
But if you’ve got a wheelchair, you do not use a wheelchair by turning right angles and actually human beings don’t walk in right angles. They walk continuously like water flows really.
The key tenets of Johnny’s approach to designing kitchen are very well positioned to apply them to notions of inclusive design. [35:00] No eye level cupboards? Ideal for someone who uses a wheelchair as it means things aren’t out of reach. No continuous work surface but instead dedicated work surfaces set flexibly at specific heights for specific tasks? Likewise it means that worksurfaces can be raised or lowered to suit people seated or standing. No sharp corners but rounded edges instead? Much safer for people with visual impairments, or for those prone to falls.
And so Johnny’s latest, incredibly ambitious project feels like a natural progression. At the heart all the work he’s done so far is making kitchens sociable. If you look back over his numerous previous projects, or read any of the countless broadsheet features on him over the past few decades, you’ll see how he’s ripped out rooms, torn down walls, done whatever it takes to make big beautiful kitchens that aren’t hidden away, and that the people who live in the houses can spend time in….together. And this is an extension of that, but expanding on Johnny’s ideas and designs in order to make something which has the potential to be truly life changing.
Probably 10 years ago, Newcastle University appoints a guy called Professor Tom Kirkwood to head up a sort of aging research centre. And he wrote this book called The End of Age And then some bright spark in Whitehall says ok, we need a national centre for ageing, and it turns itself into that.
Professor Tom Kirkwood started to hire scientists to work with him on the project, and one of those joining him was Professor Peter Gore, whose background is in medical product design but also ageing research.
Peter Gore comes to do a talk at a kitchen industry event which I’m at, and basically sort of showing the opportunities and people’s attitudes towards again, and a lot of it is inherited from nineteenth century medical, I’m being very simplistic here so forgive me, nineteenth century medicalisation of age, ageing sorry. So we think about it as deterioration from day 1. It’s never about other things. Never about the fact that you can start jogging at the age of 70 and you know, you’ll be fine. He’s being very rude about the kitchen industry and kitchen designers, and secretly, I’m totally on his side.
So we make friends, and he invites me up to Newcastle to the National Centre for Aging to do a talk on kitchen design. And the night before, I’ve had a terrible flu and I’m feeling shit, and I do what I regard as a terrible talk, but everybody loves it, and Professor Tom Kirkwood is in the room and he comes up to me afterwards and says Johnny fantastic, how lovely, please come and work with us sort of thing.
And then three years ago, Osbourne, before he fires himself over Brexit of whatever, if he gives them £15 million, kinda match funded by the EU, and that was to create the National Innovation Centre for Ageing. And that’s where we put the prototype, and that’s where it is right now.
The prototype Johnny’s talking about is a kitchen. A so-called 4G, or multigenerational kitchen, designed with multigenerational family households in mind but actually really just delivering a great piece of inclusive design that could work for all kinds of households, all kinds of people.
But, the core principles are...kind of what I’ve already said to you…which is all about eye contact, it’s about people engaging with conversation, supporting many different activities, every work surface that you can have can rise and fall and then you’ve got that nice big curved larder in one corner so a wheelchair can access it, but then also you can strip the walls back so you can have other things on the walls. And then on top of that you’ve got some of the core, tech safety elements that Peter is working on. And they include drawers that will lock, so if you’ve got people with Alzheimers they won’t be able to use the drawers. It’s got flooding warnings, things that will turn the gas off. And then, my contribution really is this fantastic work surface where you can use cordless appliances. And there’s this fantastic French company called Eurokera, and have a look at them, they’re really fun.
Eurokera make a cooking surface which incorporates induction technology into a seamless glass ceramic surface. This means you could cook anywhere on it, rather than having to rely on the traditional two hob, four hob, six hob system - your whole surface, your whole kitchen island could be a potential cooking surface. This is safer than a traditional hob too, as induction glass ceramic doesn’t get as hot to the touch as but also - thanks to its flexible nature - makes it much easier for Johnny to realise his dream of everyone cooking facing into the room making eye contact with each other.
[40:00] The prototype kitchen is ..beautiful. Like all of Johnny’s designs, it’s incredibly aesthetically pleasing and the video I’ve watched about it quite a few times just makes me want to reach out and touch the curved wooden surfaces and rounded edges of it. As well as the practical elements, there’s details like bespoke wallpaper designed to appeal to the nostalgic. The National Innovation Centre for Ageing is slowly opening up to the public after the pandemic, but until then…
The only people allowed into the building are the cleaners and the kitchen is designed to appeal to your emotions as you can imagine after what I’ve just said and a lot of it is to do with touch, and the cleaners really like cleaning it cause it’s full of things you can touch. But really, it’s really sad. It hasn’t yet really been utilised. But the spirit of what we did is good and the research we’ve done on it will hopefully lead to a lot more research. I need to now take it down to much smaller kitchens.
I am so excited by this project. I’ve become a huge fan of Johnny’s work over the past year or so - so many people I met while making this series told me I needed to speak to him, and speaking to Johnny was a complete joy. His passion and conviction are really infectious. Look, honestly I couldn’t afford one of Johnny’s bespoke kitchens - his previous clients have included people like Trudie Styler, and Steve Jobs - but I’m in awe of the care and craftsmanship that goes into every single one of his designs, and every single one is designed to be sociable and fit the users needs exactly. And although his personal designs are very expensive, actually his ideas are applicable to so many kitchens and they’ve really changed how I think about kitchens. I’ll tell anyone who will listen now that we shouldn’t wash up facing the wall, we shouldn’t cook facing the wall. We should be able to cook and be sociable and make eye contact at the same time.
So one thing I really wanted to ask Johnny before we finished our conversation was about a different kind of accessibility than we’d been talking about. Because the ideas behind the multigenerational kitchen...they’re important. They’re actually pretty vital and would be life changing to so many people. And so really I want them to be as widely available as possible.
LD: And you when you said that you're looking at bringing it into smaller spaces. But do you think this is going to be something that will be available to people who you know, don't maybe have the money to put a huge bespoke kitchen in?
JG: Lucy, really, I so hope and pray so. So now there's there's a little bit of a problem here? Because you asked a very good question right at the beginning, which I didn't really fully answer about why the UK kitchen industry or why is it? So why is it so incapable of innovation? But anyway, UK manufacturers, almost all of it. Now, there's I think it's something like 70% of the cabinetry market is actually supplied from within the UK. So cabinet wise we do quite well. Part of the reason is because of the pricing of people like Howdens: their pricing is incredibly effective. And their business model is really clever. But it doesn't lend itself to innovation because basically they're using builders, as you know, to do the selling and the designing. And that is clever on one level but it..here's no way you're going to get innovation like that. But they are well priced. So, you know, you can't argue with that, I suppose. But yes, if we could get combat if we could get together with a big manufacturer. So I have to become the salesman here. So that's why Peter Gordon is trying to set up this new company, which will be a joint venture with Newcastle University. We We We hope we've got a CEO as from Well, next week, we've been...we've interviewed somebody really good. And his job would be develop the company and find business opportunities and a way we can introduce these low cost kitchens, into people's lives. And if you said to me, can we do it? I think I could say to you, look, you know, I have not done it. I don't know. But there are two or three things that we could do that will make a difference straightaway.
Who knows what our next kitchen might look like? I’m hopeful that at least some of Johnny and the rest of the team at the National Innovation Centre for Ageing’s work will trickle down to the kitchens of the people who most need it.
***
Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode, Sean Warmington-Wan, Katie Pennick and Johnny Grey.
[45:00] There’s a Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
If you’ve enjoyed what you heard on this episode, or generally on Lecker, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening, and telling a friend about it!
Hello, World!