kitchens to covet less is more
O reader Mark Joy shares his tips on rearranging a kitchen to make it the heart of the home and a pleasure to cook in
I’m a marketing consultant who worked for agencies for 25 years before becoming a freelancer six years ago. I currently work four days a week as head of marketing for the luxury retailer Chesneys. I live in St Margarets, London, with my wife, a director of a PR firm, and our 21-month-old son Henry.
Our kitchen is a compact rectangle contained in a rear extension, with bi-fold doors that open on to the garden. The kitchen is a Beckermann with NEFF appliances, white Corian surfaces and an island that houses the hob. It’s well loaded with tech, including three ovens (conventional, steam and microwave), an induction hob, a large fridge with filtered water and ice-maker, and a small wine fridge. It’s even got a NEFF warming/proving drawer. Just outside the back doors is our heater BBQ , another essential for us all year round.
We didn’t design this kitchen ourselves, though we have made alterations. That said, the kitchen did play a big part in our decision to buy this house. It’s not the biggest in the world but, with the amount of storage, useful tech and great light, it’s lovely to use, and its connection to the south-facing garden is so good, we only need one dining table that we can set inside or out. From April to October the doors are often fully open from first thing in the morning to bedtime.
I’m a keen cook (and a very disappointing 2013 participant in MasterChef) and do the majority of the cooking, and I need a space that is easy to use but also enables me to do more advanced things, when the inspiration strikes.
Every kitchen needs a great fridge, lots of storage, a highly responsive hob, an oven that can do every sort of cooking, from low-and-slow to pizza, and good light to prep and cook in. The things I use every day are the things I value most: an unusually long chef’s knife that can halve a large pumpkin yet also finely chop a shallot; an old-fashioned glass lemon squeezer; and a large cast-iron Le Creuset casserole.
The greatest pleasure we get from the kitchen is entertaining, though of course that hasn’t happened due to lockdown. In the absence of being able to have friends over, we have had a few evenings when we have created authentic restaurant evenings at home. For our River Café evening, some friends that work at the restaurant even gave us blank menus and paper tablecloths so we could complete the look. That was one of our favourite evenings in this kitchen, though our Bocca di Lupo night ran it a close second.
I have designed several kitchens from scratch in the past and my advice is threefold. Firstly, never underestimate the need for adequate counter space – it’s easy to cram kitchens with equipment but if you haven’t got room to work it can get very hectic and unenjoyable. Secondly, get the lighting right. If you can’t see well, you can’t cook properly. Thirdly, get a big fridge – ice is as important as the internet.
It’s a cliché, but the kitchen is the heart of the home and so the adaptations we made to ours were all about making room in an overcrowded space. While we surrendered a breakfast bar and some cupboard space, what we gained was room for a sofa, a TV and a brass-topped dining table. We spend nearly half of our time in that recovered space. Ironically, one of the most important things we did to our kitchen was make it smaller.