Our house is a little less than 1700 square feet of living space. Around 1000 square feet covers our open plan kitchen, living, dining space. Because that space is open and the house is very airtight and well insulated, we heat it with a single minisplit heat pump. If the space was three separate rooms, we'd need a different, more expensive, less efficient heating system, either a ducted heat pump with ducts running to each room or a multisplit heat pump with heads in each room.
Open plans aren't for everyone, but they work well for us and for a lot of people. We like having the winter sun penetrate into the kitchen on the North side. It's a fairly modest kitchen that I built myself.
As for huge kitchens with $15,000 ranges, I suspect there's an inverse relationship between them and actual nightly meal preparation.
Lloyd wrote: "What I hope is happening now is the return of the closed, separate kitchen, which we never should have given up on in the first place."
Hope springs eternal, as they say—but it flies in the face of social convention, as well as interpersonal and familial norms. The kitchen has been, and always will be, the heart of the house (or is it more apropos to write it's the stomach of the house?)
Either way, there's a lot to unpack from the quote that somehow "proves" it is the complete opposite: “Parents’ comments on these spaces reflect a tension between culturally situated notions of the tidy home and the demands of daily life. The photographs reflect sinks at various points of the typical weekday, but for most families, the tasks of washing, drying, and putting away dishes are never done. … Empty sinks are rare, as are spotless and immaculately organized kitchens. All of this, of course, is a source of anxiety."
Anxiety? Really? Is that how our ancestors looked at it instead of a prep-do-finish task performed multiple times a day? How far we've fallen! Here's what you need to know:
A. Teach your children responsibility. When the meal is done, clear the table, load the dishwasher.
B. Learn to do a task to completion. Meals do not end once the food is off the plate.
C. Learn how to declutter your life. If dishes pile up, DO THEM AS SOON AS THE MEAL IS DONE. If the counters are “fully laden with piles of bills, bulky toys, and the ephemera of daily living” then learn how to tackle those things AS THEY COME IN. Everything has a place; if kids throw their books on the floor, teach them how to put them away in their rooms. If the table is where all the bills land, BUY A FILING CABINET AND/OR INBOX/OUTBOX TRAYS. If toys are on the counters, either make the kids put them back where they belong or throw them out. The crying fit of losing a beloved toy only needs to be endured once before it never happens again. In other words, BE A RESPONSIBLE PERSON. If you're a parent of young kids, BE A RESPONSIBLE PARENT AS WELL. "Parent" is not just a noun, it's a verb.
No one wants unexpected guests—let alone someone invited to a planned dinner—to walk in and see a messy house, no matter how well-loved that house is. It's decorum, it's civil, it's good manners. Yes, it stems from the 1950's housewife who could often expect unexpected guests to stop by because many of her neighbors' wives also were stay-at-home moms and people typically didn't lock their front doors. But the idea that we should preferentially embrace clutter and sinks or counters full of dirty dishes as being "normal" or superior to a clean, clutter-free kitchen is wildly ironic given your aesthetic for minimalism and modernism, Lloyd.
Lloyd, I gotta agree with you. Often times these small homes are designed by people like yourself, architects, who know better but they design with what the customer tells them, even if you try to point out that it makes no sense.
But that takes me to my point... As my old Master Sergeant once told me: "That's the reason they make Fords and Chevrolets."
Our house is a little less than 1700 square feet of living space. Around 1000 square feet covers our open plan kitchen, living, dining space. Because that space is open and the house is very airtight and well insulated, we heat it with a single minisplit heat pump. If the space was three separate rooms, we'd need a different, more expensive, less efficient heating system, either a ducted heat pump with ducts running to each room or a multisplit heat pump with heads in each room.
Open plans aren't for everyone, but they work well for us and for a lot of people. We like having the winter sun penetrate into the kitchen on the North side. It's a fairly modest kitchen that I built myself.
As for huge kitchens with $15,000 ranges, I suspect there's an inverse relationship between them and actual nightly meal preparation.
Lloyd wrote: "What I hope is happening now is the return of the closed, separate kitchen, which we never should have given up on in the first place."
Hope springs eternal, as they say—but it flies in the face of social convention, as well as interpersonal and familial norms. The kitchen has been, and always will be, the heart of the house (or is it more apropos to write it's the stomach of the house?)
Either way, there's a lot to unpack from the quote that somehow "proves" it is the complete opposite: “Parents’ comments on these spaces reflect a tension between culturally situated notions of the tidy home and the demands of daily life. The photographs reflect sinks at various points of the typical weekday, but for most families, the tasks of washing, drying, and putting away dishes are never done. … Empty sinks are rare, as are spotless and immaculately organized kitchens. All of this, of course, is a source of anxiety."
Anxiety? Really? Is that how our ancestors looked at it instead of a prep-do-finish task performed multiple times a day? How far we've fallen! Here's what you need to know:
A. Teach your children responsibility. When the meal is done, clear the table, load the dishwasher.
B. Learn to do a task to completion. Meals do not end once the food is off the plate.
C. Learn how to declutter your life. If dishes pile up, DO THEM AS SOON AS THE MEAL IS DONE. If the counters are “fully laden with piles of bills, bulky toys, and the ephemera of daily living” then learn how to tackle those things AS THEY COME IN. Everything has a place; if kids throw their books on the floor, teach them how to put them away in their rooms. If the table is where all the bills land, BUY A FILING CABINET AND/OR INBOX/OUTBOX TRAYS. If toys are on the counters, either make the kids put them back where they belong or throw them out. The crying fit of losing a beloved toy only needs to be endured once before it never happens again. In other words, BE A RESPONSIBLE PERSON. If you're a parent of young kids, BE A RESPONSIBLE PARENT AS WELL. "Parent" is not just a noun, it's a verb.
No one wants unexpected guests—let alone someone invited to a planned dinner—to walk in and see a messy house, no matter how well-loved that house is. It's decorum, it's civil, it's good manners. Yes, it stems from the 1950's housewife who could often expect unexpected guests to stop by because many of her neighbors' wives also were stay-at-home moms and people typically didn't lock their front doors. But the idea that we should preferentially embrace clutter and sinks or counters full of dirty dishes as being "normal" or superior to a clean, clutter-free kitchen is wildly ironic given your aesthetic for minimalism and modernism, Lloyd.
Lloyd, I gotta agree with you. Often times these small homes are designed by people like yourself, architects, who know better but they design with what the customer tells them, even if you try to point out that it makes no sense.
But that takes me to my point... As my old Master Sergeant once told me: "That's the reason they make Fords and Chevrolets."