Millennials feed growing appetite for small kitchens
Young urbanites, opting for microkitchens, are changing the design landscape
SEATTLE— For many, the American dream kitchen has long been a grand showplace, filled with granite islands that stretch like aircraft carriers through a sea of shining appliances.
But in the urban technology centres that have become the nation’s new factory towns, the kitchen gold standard glorified in design magazines and lovingly ogled in Nancy Meyers movies is being redefined. In cities like Seattle, where Amazon plans to fill 10 million square feet of office space, the kitchens of young cooks have small footprints and shrunken appliances.
The microkitchen, stocked with expensive blenders, elaborate coffee makers and professional-quality knives, suits digital workers who eat free at work or take their meals in homey but globally influenced restaurants in their apartment buildings. Dinner may come from one of a dozen app-based delivery services, either as a fully prepared chef’s special or a meal kit that requires cooking but not much chopping.
That does not mean no one is cooking. Food has become a cultural touchstone, and what and how one eats are as important to some people in their 20s and early 30s as certain genres of music or film were to previous generations.
“We are kind of a showoff generation, and food very much matters, especially when you are around other people,” said Jolee Nebert, 22, a student of industrial design at Western Washington University. Last year, she packed a fully functioning kitchen into a1.8-metre unit and won a design competition held at General Electric’s experimental factory in Louisville, Ky.
“People are willing to shrink the square footage of their kitchen for more versatility and more open space to entertain guests,” Nebert said. “It’s about packing more into less space.”
To be sure, apartment dwellers in big cities such as New York, Paris and Tokyo have coped for ages with tiny kitchens as a matter of necessity, not choice. But these microkitchens are now being embraced by a group of early adopters who could easily afford much larger ones, and whose culinary preferences could shape kitchen design for years to come.
Appliance makers such as General Electric, Miele and Bosch report rising demand for stoves that have been shaved by 15 centimetres, dishwash- ers a mere 45 centimetres wide and refrigerators that are set inside drawers. Sales of Miele’s 61-centimetre speed ovens, designed to cook food more quickly than standard ovens, have risen 37 per cent since 2012. Sales of smaller convection ovens jumped 65 per cent in that time, said Kathrin Pfeifer, the product manager for the company’s cooking appliances.
Although older buyers accounted for about three-quarters of the $6.2 billion spent last year on steamers, espresso makers and other small appliances, millennials were the only demographic group who bought more of them than they did a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, which studies consumer spending.
“If you look at the purchases among millennials, you see a picture of people trying to get more freshness out of these small kitchens quicker,” said Darren Cypher, a food and beverage industry analyst at NPD.
Among America’s millennial generation, classified generally as the 60 million people ages 18-34, cooking is not viewed as a daily chore but as one of several ways to eat on any given day, said Laurie Demeritt, the chief executive of the Hartman Group, which studies trends for the food industry.
They like their meals to be healthful and authentic, but they cook only when the mood strikes.
“I wouldn’t underestimate how engaged this generation is in food and cooking,” Demeritt said. “They are approaching cooking as a choice, which makes it more fun and whimsical and desirable.”