Kelly's Kitchen Sync

Home Trends to watch from the PCBC show

The Pacific Coast Builder's Show was smaller, finer version than it's been in the past. 50 years old this year, it's smaller, as in one football-field worth of displays instead of 3-4. Much easier to get around and in some ways, a boon for the booths there. When I went on the Thursday, it was busy. 

 

There were many interesting items - integrated solar roof systems and on-demand water heaters and outdoor kitchens, but there were three items that stood out for me this year: one because it's a long overdue, two because I'm seeing the commercial design elements spill into residential, and the third because of the same spillover from commercial but also because it's an intriguing idea. Let me show you what I saw.

A reader asks: Can a gas oven be installed under a cooktop?

Hi Kelly

I was reading your answer 'Lisa' from April 14, 2009 entitled "how much space is required for a cooktop and oven?" I have been searching for information and yours was very helpful, especially the link to NKBA you provide.

I am looking for the minimum dimensions to have a drop in cooktop with a wall oven under it.  I very much prefer the look of a cooktop over a range, and do not want to eat up counter space. I want a 30" oven, gas, and all i can find is one by American Range,  but it is 30.25" inches tall. I am trying to find info on whether I can install that under a cook top. It puts it pretty much an the floor. The oven has french doors, so I'm not worried about the ergonomics, I'm worried about any safety issue of clearance between the oven and floor and then oven and cooktop.

 Any info you can provide would be appreciated. Jody

 

Hi Jody -

Glad you found the information helpful.

Here's what I know: Appliance specifications pretty much rule my world, especially with gas. My dad used to work for a gas pipeline company in his youth and he was pretty respectful of all things gas. The city and county inspectors in my area don't pass our projects if we deviate in any way from both the plumbing/gas codes or any dimensions that encroach on the minimum specifications.

(A quick note - I can count the gas ovens I've designed in a kitchen on one hand, so if another professional with more experience chimes in with his or her two cents, we'll be happy campers.)

Having said that, I'm afraid I'm the bearer of bad news: I don't believe you'll be able to install a gas range under a cooktop.  Almost all gas ovens I'm familiar with have the gas inlet installed on the bottom of the unit. This is an important factor in how high the oven is placed and American Range is no different.

Pendant lighting and an island hood

I promise to get into zones as soon as I have a bit more time to lay the concept out clearly, but I wanted to get back to a bit of design.

This came up yesterday and I thought it might be useful. I'm working on an island design with a peninsula hood fan and a couple of pendants.

Home Trends to Watch: Multi-tasking ovens

(Timeline: depends on economic recovery and the increase of Gen-X homebuyers. I'll see it this year, but most likely demand will be greater in 3- to 5-years.)

For those of you playing along at home, there are two important kitchen design factors to pay attention to -- the re-structuring of appliances for the next generation and the re-introduction of appliances as future forward.

By restructuring, I'm referring to the tweaking of existing design for modern family usage. The emergence of double drawer dishwashers, microwave drawers, and refrigerators with bottom freezers are all good examples.

The shiny future factor for ovens and ranges has been a bit more of a challenge. I first saw the wave of trend ovens with touchpads and colored LED displays back at the 2006 KBIS, yet by the end of 2007, the feedback from my clients wasn't entirely positive, enough that I posted a mock letter to the appliance manufacturers.

The people buying these higher-end products? Baby Boomers. Touchpads with multiple choices were not only overwhelming and counter-intuitive to people used to a simple control knob, but reading the numbers with bifocals--especially when the controls are at the top of a double oven combination--was also a literal pain-in-the-neck.

The manufacturers were too early.

Kill the work triangle

Please? Let it die. Stab it if you have to.

Here's why: the term is a time-warp from a 1940s design study--University of Illinois Small Homes Council-Building Research, 1946-1949, if you want to be specific. Note the date; also note the term small. There was a housing shortage after the Second World War and the race was on for affordable housing.

 

(An old ad from Magic Chef, circa 1946)

There's a bit more to it than the glossing I'm providing here, but the gist is the work triangle was an efficient way of working between all three work/prep areas of a kitchen, which were defined by the stove, a refrigerator that wasn't a tribute to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the sink. One person (usually "mom") cooked, canned, ironed, and served the family meals. You could count your cookbooks on one hand and a typical dinner consisted of meat, potatoes, and one other vegetable. Vegetables weren't necessarily bought at a store; they might have been supplied from a home garden or a neighbor. 

Contrast this with today. Kitchens can be two or three (or four or five) times larger. Our list of cooking tools and small appliances are easily doubled, if not quadrupled, from 1946, and I joke that getting some clients to admit how many cookbooks they truly have involves a therapy program. A kitchen where the clients are from Mumbai is completely different from the clients from Hong Kong, and many of my friends and clients can cook a few recipes from both.

All of which makes the work triangle about as useful as following a recipe from the 1856 Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book (pages 83-84):

"...The fire must be made the back side of the oven...

If you sprinkle flour on the bottom, and it burns quickly, it is too hot.

If you can't hold your hand in to count to twenty, moderately, it is hot enough.

If you can count to thirty moderately, it is not hot enough for bread.

These last are not very accurate tests, as the power to bear heat is so diverse in different persons..." 

Gee. Can't wait.

In the early '90s, the NKBA was onto a good thing with a multiple rectangle concept - the idea being where the microwave or separate ovens were considered a fourth or fifth element, taking into account families who didn't always eat together and the assumption that there might be multiple cooks. It never caught on - I suspect partly because of insufficient p.r. and partly due to too much flexibility in deciding what the four corners of the rectangle actually were.

Here: if you're going to use the work triangle, have another look at the Beecher cookbook -- it actually has some useful tips. I learned how to turn sour milk back to normal, or at least as soon as I can figure out where to find carbonate of magnesia...

Ask Christopher Lowell!

By happy coincidence, I found Christopher Lowell on Twitter this morning, which led me to his website. Hooray!

Yes, the hooray is a hint I like his design. I know he's gone on to bigger and better things, but I remember him for The Christopher Lowell Show at the beginning of the decade. My mother and I have his books, Seven Layers of Design, and If You Can Dream it, You Can Do It! We poured over those books, drawing inspiration from his ideas and discussing how his training as a set designer really flavored his design and generally talking as if he was in the room with us and we were all having a good chat. (Which, I suppose, in a way we were.)

I discovered he's working on a web program where he answers viewer design questions, so that means you. Here's the link I found on his blog today:

It will be primarily driven by your viewer mail and videos so, now’s the time to get your questions into my sister at viewermail@christopherlowell.com. Shortly, as we get closer to the debut, we’ll be posting new guidelines to will help better ‘frame’ your questions in a way that makes our answers more effective and meaningful to you. But suffice to say, the more concise your questions, info and visuals are to us, the more relevant our answers and designs will be to you. Don’t be surprised if one of our producers calls for more clarity, should we find your design question particularly intriguing.

(Note to Christopher - might be nice to have your sister's name? Now I'm envisioning, "Dear Viewer Email" or "Dear Christopher Lowell's Sister." That's what you get when I've only had one cup of coffee...) If I was still in television production, I would have loved working on something like this.

(6/17/09-Edited to add: I came back to check the links and the blog post is gone. Could be it's undergoing revision; I'll contact them later when I get a chance to breathe. Busy today!
6/18/09 - Edited to add: They've informed me it was a blog glitch and thanked us all for the heads-up. Should be repaired by now.)

Regarding your design questions, here's a semi-educated guess on what they might be looking for:

• Questions with a common theme a lot of viewers can relate to. ("How do I add charm to my 1980s tract entry way?")
• Questions that have some element of unique design. ("My cabinets are made of brick. Help!")
• Something Christopher would find intriguing. (What's the point of being executive producer if you don't get to pick something fun? )

So get those questions into the e-mail above...

Fascinating rugs

The other day I blogged about the floor as the sixth wall for design possibilities--the ceiling being the fifth--and how floor design has become an important element for mid-level and higher-end North American homes. (It always has been in luxury homes, but I've noticed a steady trickle-down the past couple of years.) Yet when I happened across this site, I initially hesitated (mine, preciousss, all mine!) before deciding it was too good to keep to myself.

Behold the creative rug design from Top Floors based in London. (Easy clue: the distributors and suppliers tab is marked "stockists." Far more elegant, don't you think?  I vote we adopt it immediately.)

Pattern: Ethereal

Esti Barnes is the Design Director and her designs have garnered awards in the past few years, including  2008 British Design of the Year for the design below:

A Reader Asks (Redux)

Hi Kelly -- Your blog is a hoot!... I'm curious to know what you mean in your profile by "generational design conduit" in your Twitter profile? Steve

Hi, Steve, and thanks for stopping by!

I realized in the last year-and-a-half that my focus has been on the differences in the three generations of consumers, or as I like to say, clients and future-clients. We typically know them (ad-nauseam) as: 

• Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964. End dates vary depending on sources)
• Gen-X (1962-64 to 1981-83)
  
• Gen-Y or Millennials (1982-1983 to 1999-2003.)

As with every group/pattern study, there's never an allowance for those who don't fit any molds, so we'll go with the generalizations for now.

So why did I use the word conduit in relation to generational design? Well, it was a tad tongue-in-cheek, (Edited to add: Hah! You made me go back and tweak my profile) but here's the definition:

Conduit: (Webster-Merriam Online)

Etymology:Middle English, from Anglo-French cunduit pipe, passage, conduct, in part from cunduit, past participle of cunduire to lead, from Latin conducere, in part from Medieval Latin conductus. 14th century

...4: a means of transmitting or distributing <a conduit for illicit payments> <a conduit of information>

Since I couldn't get the illicit payments happening, I had to go with the informational portion of the show.

Home Trends to Watch: Wireless Televisions

(Timeline: Now. Mass market in 3-5 years for mid-to-high level homes.)

My mother, Carol Morisseau, is also a CMKBD, CID, and a Baby Boomer as well. With regards to trends, you can't beat her: she's more wired in than The Matrix although she'll disagree. Hence the following conversation:

Me: "I can't think of anything to discuss this week for Home Trends. Help."

Mom: "You haven't been paying attention to the electronics market, have you? What about wireless televisions?"

Me: "But they've been threatening this since 2004. Besides, didn't they go static-y and drop transmission?"

Mom: "That was some of the battery versions."

Me: *eyedart* "Um, it was busy this week?"

Mom: *mom look* "They debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Last winter.  Ellen Cheever mentioned it at our meeting this week. Go write what you know and then I'll tell you the good stuff."

All righty then.

 

Does green design have to = contemporary?

The answer is no, it doesn't, but you couldn't tell from all the magazines filled with glass and steel and concrete linearity. These items, the magazines announce, are the Next Big Thing.

Let's show you what I mean.

Last week, I visited the Margarido House in the Oakland hills. Beautiful, without a doubt, chock-full of energy-saving and environmentally responsible materials -- enough that the builder and homeowner, Mike McDonald of McDonald Construction, is seeking a platinum LEED-H rating.(Check out the website and the Google images.)

 
(Photo credit: SFGate/McDonald Construction & Development)

Architects are visiting from all over the country and it's featured in just about every magazine you can think of. But that's just it. It seems that every contemporary design is lauded as the only way to green design. But what about those of us who aren't comfortable living in a contemporary home? Who have a 1950s bungalow? Or a 1980s split level with no plans (or money) to tear down and re-build?  How do you reconcile sleek and metal with the intrinsic home design without it looking like something out of  Beetlejuice?  More importantly, do you have to give up your style in order to be green?

The answer is still no.

Here's another home, also in Oakland. When I discovered it, I did the happy dance. (No, there will be no YouTube of this.) Check out the Gottfried Home - A 1915 Craftsman bungalow. It has a Platinum LEED rating as well, a whopping 106.5 points (80 is required). And it fits - fits with the style, fits with the warmth. The owner, David Gottfried, is no stranger to green design - he founded the U.S. Green Building Council and the World Green Building Council so you'd think there'd be some good choices in his green design, wouldn't you?

(Credit: Gottfried Home)

The magazine, Metropolitan Home, (writer: Peter Hellman) recently did an article on the home -- see what you think and if there's anything you can take away from this. Here's a picture of the kitchen to get you started. Have fun!

(Photo credit: Metropolitan Home)

(Edited to add: I found this blog post by architect Suzy at ThinkDwell when searching for traditional green design: "Does affordable green design have to be so modern when I want TRADITIONAL!"  How strange we'd post about the same thing on the same day. And no, I've never met her.)