The evolution of undercover fridges
Hidden behind panels, kitchen workhorse ups its game in form and function
The kitchens of the wealthy today are capable of providing a humbling experience to the uninitiated. Attempts to procure ice cubes can transform the most dignified guest into a hapless burglar rummaging through drawers for loose gems.
“I don’t think I’ve had a client that’s wanted to reveal their fridge for a very long time,” said Martyn Lawrence Bullard, an English interior designer whose namesake firm in Los Angeles has evanesced major household appliances for the likes of Cher, Tommy Hilfiger and Kylie Jenner.
“In the last five years, everything we’ve done has had a hidden fridge.”
“Panel-ready” refrigerators, the facades of which are designed to accommodate custom pieces of wood indistinguishable from a kitchen’s built-in cabinetry, have become standard.
“You’d be shocked how much space” luxury kitchens devote to hidden refrigeration, said Shannon Wollack, founder of Studio Life/Style design firm in West Hollywood, Calif. “A lot of people,” she said, elect to incorporate two refrigerators, side by side.
What are the wealthy manipulating to levels of coldness and freshness — far beyond nature’s intrinsic capacity — in quantities requiring such vast storage?
Drinks, mostly.
“They like to have lots of beverages,” said Wollack.
A popular drawer setup, Wollack said, incorporates three small refrigerated partitions: one for wine, one for drinks other than wine and one for fresh produce. Bullard has known clients to use them for storing face creams and beauty products.
“A bunch of people put them in their bathrooms now,” he said.
Cabinet camouflage is likewise not a modern innovation: For a short time in the 1950s, General Electric advertising copy boasted of a horizontal refrigeration system built to hang “on the wall like a picture,” available in colours such as
“Most of our clients these days tend to just end up using their freezers for ice and ice cream.” MARTYN LAWRENCE BULLARD INTERIOR DESIGNER
“petal pink” and “turquoise green.”
But while the wealthy are anxious to chill an ever-increasing volume of perishable items, one thing they are increasingly less inclined to do, per Bullard, is freeze them.
“Freezing food is becoming less and less fashionable,” he said. “People want to eat more organically.”
“Most of our clients these days tend to just end up using their freezers for ice and ice cream.”
Likewise out of favour are refrigerators with built-in automatic water and ice dispensers that enable weary fridge owners to procure a drink without stopping to open the unit.
Ice comes now from one of several varieties of squat standalone machines dedicated solely to creating ice of a particular shape, texture and clarity. The highest-end models of these can cost a few thousand dollars.
Reality television has served as a venue for average Americans’ exposure to high-end refrigeration since the early 2000s. In MTV’s “Cribs,” a popular series in which entertainers purported to give viewers tours of their private homes, peeks inside refrigerators were a signature element of the show. (Many were stocked primarily with drinks, including, memorably, a supermarket display quantity of Vitaminwater neatly arranged in the refrigerator of 50 Cent.)
“The Real Housewives” franchise has provided another window through which viewers can scrutinize the design choices of America’s elite — cast members are frequently filmed in their spotless, sprawling kitchens.
The enormous glass closet stocked with baskets of Technicolor-vibrant produce installed in the home of “Real Housewife,” Yolanda Hadid — who left the show in 2016 — drew attention on the show’s Beverly Hills franchise.
Despite the visual appeal of Hadid’s lushly stocked fridge, most clients “don’t go with the glass front — as much as they would like to,” Wollack said.
All-glass fridges require a level of maintenance generally incompatible with human life.
“You have to be organized and keep your fridge very, very tidy,” Bullard said. “Otherwise it doesn’t look good at all. And they’re very expensive. They’re $15,000, $20,000.”
Wollack and Bullard both said that the fervour for concealing appliances resulted from kitchens increasingly being used as rooms for casual congregation.
“Kitchens used to be concealed,” Wollack said. “It had a door. That was where you had all your appliances. It was like the work space. And now, kitchens are more of a lifestyle. You want to make it pretty and seamless.”
These spaces are being furnished “as living rooms,” Bullard said. “We add art. You add expensive lighting. The island becomes sort of the modernday dining table.”