IS PANTRY NECESSARY?

Every kitchen needs a pantry – ideally. This ideal, though, has not always been translated into practice these days. Most households are good enough to have a kitchen.

In the past, a home would have to be affluent to have a pantry of some sort. Before the era of microwave meals and pre-processed cuisine, a well-stocked pantry was required for good domestic management. For sure, it gave the house residents some feeling of security and abundance.

Many homeowners today think that built-in cabinetry would do the function of a whole space devoted as pantry. This view is boosted by the convenience of local supermarkets. So, pantries have generally become unnecessary in the modern kitchen.

But other homeowners believe that whatever the size of the kitchen, it should at least include a convenient place where to store groceries. And, to them, this critical storage requires careful thought and planning. This type of homeowners will find helpful the ideas of senior designer Jon Lo, MFA, which he shares at the website http://starcraftcustombuilders.com:

“A pantry should be large enough to hold at least a week’s worth of groceries, and close enough to the food preparation area to be easily accessed. While size does matter, simplicity, organization and the right location are usually more important than size alone. A well-designed small pantry will usually provide better, more convenient and more functional storage than a poorly designed large pantry. Convenience, accessibility and visibility are the key attributes of a great pantry.”

Lo explains, “Convenient, if it is located at or near the area where food is prepared, not necessarily in the kitchen, but if not, then in an adjacent area; viewable, if everything in the pantry can be seen at a glance; and accessible, if everything in the pantry can be easily reached and removed without moving anything else out of the way.

There are the socalled iron rules of storage, according to Lo, which are:

1. Store items near where they are first used.

2. Size storage to the things being stored.

3. Store items in a single layer with no item hidden behind or beneath another.

The rules apply to any storage, he writes, but particularly to kitchen storage, and even more particularly to pantry storage.

A pantry should be located close to where the items in the pantry are first used. This is usually the food preparation area. Lo points out that if the kitchen has a baking area, then a separate baking pantry should be located near the baking center unless the main pantry can be placed between the two work centers, and do double-duty.

He continues that if storage is sized to the things being stored, it is easier to implement Rule 3, and little space is wasted. Shelves should be just deep enough to store one row of items, and high enough so that the items just fit. There should be no wasted space, as much as possible. Shelves should be adjustable so that as storage requirements change the shelf heights can be changed.

The goal to strive for in pantry design is “at a glance visibility,” Lo emphasizes. Everything stored should be immediately visible. It does not have to require moving something out of the way in order to see what’s behind or beneath it. He advises that there should never be anything behind or underneath anything else. Obviously, this is an ideal that few pantries actually achieve, but the closer the pantry design is to this ideal, the more useful and convenient the pantry will be.

A kitchen can actually have two, even three, pantries. But it would depend on the size of the family and the quantities of kitchen supplies most often used. For average homes, one modest-size pantry may seem already a luxury. But whatever the size or number – pantry serves a very good purpose at home.