Walk through a new kitchen showroom, and you will notice how complete everything feels. The cabinet doors match. The hardware repeats. The countertop turns the corner without interruption. Appliances fit into precisely measured openings. The backsplash, pendants, faucet, flooring, and paint color were selected to work together. Nothing appears accidental. That degree of coordination is impressive. But have you ever considered how very different this is from the way most other rooms in a home are furnished?
If you missed Part 1 or Part 2, start here.
How odd would it look if a sitting room had twenty matching pieces installed permanently against the walls? We naturally expect a sofa to differ from an old chest, a lamp to have its own character, and the side tables to have been found at a different time. Books, art, textiles, and family objects create layers. And, if you think about it, part of what makes a room feel usable is that the pieces are moveable ~ you can use them any way you like! A room becomes interesting partly because it contains variation.
The typical fitted kitchen is the opposite. Long runs of identical cabinetry create a heavy visual mass. Large islands repeat the same cabinetry in the center. Upper cabinets can fill nearly every available wall. When all of those surfaces share the same color, door profile, hardware, and countertop, the eye reads them as one enormous built-in object. Let’s take a typical wooden kitchen like many of us probably have and see what it could look like if changed to an unfitted look & style.
Here is a before/after image of the same kitchen. On the left, you see the original fitted kitchen, as kitchens typically are. This is not inherently bad. Fitted cabinetry uses space very efficiently and can provide tremendous storage. A room constructed almost entirely from one coordinated system just automatically feels different from a room furnished with individual pieces. On the right side in the image, the upper cabinets have been removed, and individual pieces of furniture have been mixed & matched to perform the same functions as the uniform cabinetry. In essence, it feels much more like other rooms in the house than a center of operations ~ and the difference is incredible. It’s as if the space has become personal and is actually reflecting the unique personality of the people who live in & love that kitchen!
Materials make a difference as well. Many homeowners interpret kitchen design through the choices presented by builders, cabinet companies, and home improvement stores. Select a cabinet color, choose a quartz pattern, pick a backsplash, add coordinating hardware, all from the predetermined selection that is “trending,” and, voila, your kitchen is finished & uniquely yours. Or is it? Those products can be durable and attractive, but the process tends to encourage uniformity in the room itself, and in the look of that kitchen like any other kitchen being installed that year.
“A room becomes interesting partly because it contains variation.”
Older rooms often contain materials that do not match perfectly. Painted wood sits beside unpainted wood. Wood finishes are different. Stone shows wear. Brass darkens. A table carries small scars from years of use. Pottery varies slightly from piece to piece. These differences give the eye something to discover, and they give an ease in design, allowing the room to change with age (be used) rather than fighting every sign of use.
There is also the question of display. Modern kitchen planning often treats working objects as unsightly clutter. Appliances disappear behind panels. Dishes are tucked behind doors. The microwave, toaster, mixer, pantry goods, and even the refrigerator can be concealed. This produces a remarkably calm, sleek photograph, but really, a working kitchen is filled with useful things that can be attractive and pleasingly close at hand. A glimmering row of copper pans, a hand-woven basket storing onions or potatoes, a stack of antique ironstone plates, a hand-thrown crock of wooden spoons, or a collection of blue-and-white transferware china can make the room feel inhabited rather than staged.
Case in point: this arrangement sits on my countertop by the stove as I write. The antique mini soup tureen & lidless sugar bowl were discovered on Etsy. The tureen holds garlic cloves & whole ginger root. The sugar bowl is a perfect utensil holder, and the wooden pepper grinder was thrifted. Good news is none of this requires rejecting modern convenience; in this instance you can have your cake and eat it too! The useful lesson from unfitted kitchens is that practicality/efficiencey and beauty are not competing goals. A dresser can become a pantry, or it can store an extraordinary number of dishes. A worktable can provide an excellent preparation surface instead of a built-in island. Deep drawers can live inside an armoire that looks like furniture. Open shelves can hold attractive, curated objects used every morning.
Perhaps the most interesting shift is simply learning to think of the kitchen as a room. A room has furniture, lamps, lovely artwork, textiles, useful objects, and places where the eye can rest. It does not need every countertop or every wall optimized to the final inch.
For readers who have never considered anything beyond the familiar fitted kitchen, this can feel almost radical at first. Yet the idea is remarkably ordinary. People furnished kitchens with tables, dressers, cupboards, shelves, and work surfaces for generations. This was how it was done before the fitted kitchen existed!
The question is not whether to have a fitted versus unfitted kitchen, But, rather to see if we might borrow the look and lifestyle from older rooms to make our kitchens feel less like installations and more like places where life actually happens.
Warmly,
Rachel
