Focus Inward
by Daniel R. Hirtler on 11/09/10
After eight years in our house, having sketched out a good kitchen within the whole design of our house, we are acting on making the cabinets work better now. For years, we've kept the doors and drawers closed and ignored our messy inner life which was going on in there.
The understanding that we had about the kitchen when we constructed it intially, was that we had given up most of the cabinetry to store food and tools in order to have an open room to in which to enjoy cooking. We figured that we would be spartan in the tools and food we stored.
There are no wall cabinets in our kitchen. We do have a full wall pantry cabinet which was built with the house in 1890, the base cabinets flanking the stove and the sink, an open shelf under a stainless steel prep table which is the main prep space, and a chest high dresser in the eating area of the kitchen.
Until now, we have used the upper part of the pantry cabinet for fragile foods (ones the mice would be able to get into, the lower part for dishes and canned food or food in canisters, as well as paper towels and bottles. The dresser has more sets of dishes and serving ware. All the pots, pans, bowls and baking pans are nested on the shelf below the prep table. Silverware, knives, wraps, and miscellaneous articles and tools are in drawers flanking the stove and sink. The food in the upper pantry cabinet falls out of the cabinet when you open the doors. The mice can get into the bottom cabinet from the cellar, so the protocol of protecting and inspecting those contents is a job. the dishes in the dresser are heavier than the dresser is designed to take. The size of the drawers in the cabinets flanking the stove and refigerator is too narrow and shallow. The nesting of the cookware under the metal prep table is a sophisticated puzzle.
Over the eight years, George and I have discussed the possibilities of making the kitchen storage work better. Recently we had an idea for protecting the freshness of the food in a coordinated set of nesting containers, which would also render the remainder of the food in the cabinet mouseproof. If all of the food were coordinated in size and could nest, we could fill the volume of the cabinet without the contents tumbling out whenever the doors were open. Since we had never refinished the interior of the pantry cabinet, now was the time to mouseproof the bottom part of it by lining it in aluminum and sealing any gaps that were built into it. the mouseproof containers down there would be replaced with the same system of coordinated, nesting containers to maximize the use of the volume of the space, and the containers would sit on a rolling dolly to allow the nested containers to come out of the cabinet for selection.
This system worked incredibly well. The amount of storage is at least double what it was, and it feels like at least four times the amount of space; in fact, the full volume of the cabinet is not entirely designated, even when thinking outside of our spartan box. All the dishes fit into that cabinet too, opening the dresser for the canned goods in its shallow drawers laying on their sides with the labels facing up.
During the success of the renovation of the pantry cabinet, I finally got the courage to demolish the contents of the sink base cabinet, which was malproportioned. We have a 24" prep sink in that cabinet, and I wanted two 18" cabinets to flank the sink to match the 18" cabinet on the opposite side of the stove. The cabinet had 12" uselessly narrow drawers flanking the sink.
The cabinets were cheap (but new) eight years ago, and because they came with the house, they were free. Since we had no kitchen budget at the time, free worked well, but after having installed a tile counter over them, and plumbing being installed within them, swapping them for the cabinets we want, would have required the help of tradespeople who we are not in the position of paying right now. The hope was that I could alter the cabinet to have the correct proportions without moving it. The fear was that the cabinet would fall apart when subject to the stresses of reconfiguration.
As it turned out, many of the materials used in the cabinet were more substantial than I would have thought. The materials weren't fastened together as well as might be hoped for, which gave the cabinet the feel of being so cheap. The cabinet and the countertop survived being hollowed out, and there were ways of connecting all the parts together to make the middle of the cabinet carry the weight of the countertop (which it evidently never did before).
The three 18" spaces will now be used for a single pullout each, with a deep top drawer, and a side accessed space below. The silverware drawer will have all our silverware in two stacked trays (service for 12 in each tray; more stuff out of the dresser). All the wraps and plastic bags can be nested in another of the top drawers. All the big kitchen utensils will fit in the top drawer between the stove and the sink. One of the bottom spaces will be made light-tight for potatoes and onions. Another will have all the miscellaneous cleaning supplies, and the third is not designated yet. Here too, the space has increased beyond the need.
We have discussed the open space below the prep table, and the thought right now is to develop it as a series of tailored cubbies in a large box which sets on the open shelf. Each pot, pan and dish would have a cubby in this scheme. Each one would be directly accessible, and none would nest in another. this is the next project following the completion of the sink/stove side cabinets.
Over the years I have been in architectural practice, I have wanted to focus on a kitchen to the detail that the cabinets in ours are receiving now, but I imagined that such a discussion required the input of a client to tailor the space to the needs of the client. That would presume that a client would agree to think about the use of the kitchen with such focus. I have never had that opportunity (until now with my partner).
After having done this in our space, I wonder if the key is not the client, but the nature of the space. I wonder if the nature of the solution couldn't fall into categories, and that there could be a range of solutions, each with a way of quantifying the storage, so that a solution could be evaluated and chosen by a client without needing to imagine a way of using the kitchen beforehand. In such a situation, the solution would make sense in the space, and would have large enough capacity to operate well, and the use of the kitchen would follow the actual built structure.
