Insert Logo Here

 

KITCHEN THOUGHTS

Food preparation is becoming increasingly important in ecological homes. Wherever your food comes from, being able to process and store it efficiently and well is key, not only to our health but to our sense of connection with the natural world. From this point of view, a house and its garden should be considered as a whole. The kitchen is just one aspect of the flow and interaction of food, people and equipment in the home. In the solar courtyard house, a terraced garden, a cold storage room, a greenhouse "wet room", a masonry bread hearth and a grilling station are as much of the food system as the kitchen. (Click on the images to enlarge.)

In this context, a kitchen ideally wants to be small enough for people to move about efficiently, and to minimize material and equipment costs, but also accommodating and flexible enough to serve a variety of functions, including being a social center for the home. Building on my own analysis and experience as a designer and a parent, as well as taking cues from some leading kitchen innovators of the day, the kitchen features a single, 12’-long stainless steel work counter with an extra-wide, commercial-style sink and a cooktop consisting of a single row of four burners. A narrow but useful work surface runs along the entire length.

Kitchen with innovative sink, single-row cooktop

What makes this counter special? A wide sink (44”) means that multiple wet functions can take place at the same time, even if that involves handling things like a 3-foot long celery stick, a peck of just-picked apples or a large, dirty pan. A single-row cooktop means that all four burners become useful, and safer for not having to always be reached over. Even more important, it enables two people—or more—to work comfortably side-by-side with simultaneous access to everything they need, even in a relatively small space. Both the counter and the sliding trays and shelves above and below are supported by a Rakks storage system that can be flexibly configured both for personal and Universal Design considerations, and stainless-steel shelf rods from Ikea are incorporated to make wet-proof storage shelves where washed items can be directly placed to dry.

Having one equipment-intensive counter means that the other, island counter remains unencumbered, ready to use for activities such as preparing pastries, packaging food for freezing, casual eating and hanging out. With adjustable-height wheeled legs and wired with a corded outlet, the table can be moved about, even bridging the 1-foot level change between the kitchen and living area to serve meals like teppanyaki (table cooking on a griddle).

Other useful features of the kitchen include a floor-to ceiling pantry and a Miele speed oven that combines microwave and oven technology to significantly reduce cooking times and energy use. Finally, with the space opening out to the courtyard through slide-away glass doors, the courtyard itself becomes a work and hang-out space that serves the kitchen.

oven-pantry

Choosing a speed oven as our only kitchen oven was a big decision—would giving up the cavernous traditional oven be too hard? In the end, we decided that having a masonry-hearth bread oven as well as a gas grill that can be directly accessed from the courtyard sunspace gave us enough options to forgo the need for two wall ovens. It is challenging to think through each food habit carefully to decide what works best for one’s own family.

Just a few steps away from the kitchen is the greenhouse "wet room", which is basically a small room with large south-facing windows and a slatted-wood draining floor. In addition to being a space for bathing and laundry, the room has a rack system in the window for seed starts, kitchen herbs and other food plants. Located next to the garden, the room also becomes a convenient place to transition produce: things hosed down, laid out on racks, hung up, etc. With adequate space and no worry about getting things wet or a little dirty, this common task is transformed from a nuisance to a pleasant add-on to gardening.

Tomatoes

The panel system out of which the house is constructed allows one to build earth up around the house at will. We chose to make a ramped walkway up to our courtyard entrance on the raised main floor as part of a series of stone garden terraces on the south and east sides of the house, close to the greenhouse wet room. Buried below the terrace is a 2,000 gallon rainwater tank for garden irrigation. Together, these features take at least some of the work out of growing things so that one can keep an eye on its pleasures.