KITCHEN ELEVATION

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 418.

These days, nobody needs to cook. Families graze on cholesterol-sodden take-aways and microwaved ready-meals. Cooking is an occasional hobby and a ve­hicle for celebrity chefs. Which makes it odd that, at the same time, the kitchen has become the heart of the modern house: what the great hall was to the medieval castle and the par­lour was to the Victorian terrace, the kitchen is to the 21st-century home.

The money spent on them has risen with their status. In America the kitchen market is now worth $170 billion, five times the country's film industry. Estate agents commonly use photographs of kitchens to sell properties. An entire genre of TV reality shows has grown up to supply ideas for turning that pockey back room into a place of cherry wood cabinets, polished granite and brushed aluminium.

The elevationof the room that once be­longed only to the servants to that of de­sign showcase for the modem family tells the story of a century of social change. Right into the early 20th century, kitchens were smoky, noisy places, generally relegated underground, or to the back of the house, and as far from living space as pos­sible. That was as it should be: kitchens were for servants, and the aspiring middle classes wanted nothing to do with them.

Royalty ran them on an industrial scale. Henry VIII extended the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace into 55 rooms, covering over 3,000 square feet. They were staffed by 200 people, serving 600 meals a day. In one year during Elizabeth I`s reign the royal kitchens roasted 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs and 53 wild boar.

The scale was more modest but the principles the same for the middle class. The Victorian kitchen was organized for live - in servants, which were plentiful in England, as they were in America until the civil war. Only the poor and the servants ate in the kitchen. The master of the house scarcely set food beyond the green baize door; the mistress only to supervise. The kitchen's comfort, let alone its aesthetics, were of little concern to them.

But as the working classes prosperedand the servant shortage set in, housekeeping became a matter of interest to the literate classes.

In the 1920s, three factors ushered in the modern kitchen. One was the influence of the European modernist movement. Another was the development of electrical appliances. Finally, the rising cost of servants boosted demand for such labour-saving devices. The kitchen by the 1930s became a showcase for the middle-class home, its newest appliances badges of status. Maga­zines explained how to introduce flair and colour. A woman was taught to fulfil her dreams through her kitchen. Yet the kitchen remained a place for cooking and thus principally for women.

Shirley Conran, a British feminist writer, famously declared in the 1970s that "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom." Throwing off the apron was the first step to a woman's freedom. Today, for some working women, the celebration of gas­tronomy, and its accompanying cult of the kitchen, is in turn a liberation from this anti-domesticity creed. At last, it is accept­able to know how to bake brownies as well as read a balance sheet. For others, though, it is simply a new form of domes­tic enslavement. Not only do women now have to climb the professional ladder but they are expected to be domestic divas too.

Professional designers reckon that the kitchen of the future will be a more egali­tarianplace. Women may still be the main cook in 77% of kitchens, according to the IsoPublic survey, but men increasingly spend time there too. Mintel, a market-re­search group, suggests that British men have been inspired to put on their aprons by male celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oli­ver and Gordon Ramsay. Kitchen cata­logues show today's Bob and Betty cheer­fully chopping together in domestic bliss.

Kitchen manufacturers are responding with a cool, harder-edged look, designed to appeal to masculinetaste. Poggenphol is shortly to introduce a new model designed specially for men, in aluminium, dark gloss and glass-a "sleek and functional design language specifically addresses male customers". It comes complete with in-built high-tech audio-visual system. It even includes a cooker.

Appliance manufacturers are also beaming music, TV and the internet into the kitchen, in part to meet what are con­sidered male demands. Various manufac­turers have introduced a digital tv refriger­ator, with a built-in LCD screen on the fridge door. Electrolux has a model with an internet screen built in above the fridge doors, complete with a bar-code-detected food stockage and ordering system.

What with wireless and digital enter­tainment zones, kitchens have come a long way from the era of the open fire and blackened pot. Kitchen designers plainly think that the lure of state-of-the-art multi­media gadgetry will pull more men into the kitchen in the future. And they may well be right. But whether they go there in order to stuff a mushroom, or rather to download music and stick a frozen chicken tikka in the microwave is proba­bly an open question.