This is Day 163 of the Slow Home Project and we need you to join us in our quest to evaluate the design quality of houses in nine North American cities in nine months. This week we are finishing our analysis of Philadelphia and today we will be taking an detailed look at kitchens in single family homes.
Happy Canada Day to all the Slow Homers! For today’s “In Detail” episode, we are looking at kitchen design in single family houses. All of our examples have been pulled from the Philadelphia area.
As you remember from the “Slow Home Test“, in a Slow Home, the kitchen should have a compact work area with continuous counters, ample storage and have a good relationship to other principal spaces in the home. As you will see from our examples, many designers completely ignore these fundamentals and many kitchens in single family homes are very poorly laid out and despite their often excessive sizes, are lacking sufficient counter space and work triangles.
Click on the player below to watch John and Matthew’s “In Detail” tutorial on both good and bad kitchen design for single family houses. For today’s exercise, we need you to post examples of kitchens that you find to be either well designed or poorly designed along with your comments as to why.
To study the examples from today’s tutorial in more detail, click on the images below.
1. This is an example of a good kitchen. The “L” shaped plan has a reasonable island, a good appliance triangle and sufficient counter space.
2. This is an example of a good “U” shaped kitchen – it has a good relationship to the other principle spaces in the house as well as to the adjacent circulation area.
3. This kitchen would be vastly improved if the island had been rotated 90 degrees so that it had a parallel orientation to the back counter.
4. This is a poorly designed kitchen where the island is actually an impediment to the work triangle – note how the fridge is so removed from the sink and cook-top.
5. This is a poorly designed kitchen where the island is too big, has no functionality while the counter space on either side of the range is too small. This kitchen takes up a lot of floor area and is both rambling and choppy.
6. This is a poorly designed kitchen with a boomerang shaped kitchen counter that has an excessively sized work triangle that will require the cook to do a lot of walking. The island is also very poorly located and is oriented incorrectly to be of any use.
7. This is an example of an oversized kitchen with a tiny – almost useless island. The island can barely seat one person and has no function other than to occupy some of the excessive amount of floor space in the middle of the plan.
8. This kitchen is out of control from a design point of view. Almost every one of the Slow Home points has been ignored. The kitchen spreads itself out over a large area, but still does not have a functional appliance triangle. For its excessive size, it is unforgivable that the cook top is jammed into an inside corner in such an awkward way.
See you on Friday when we will be reviewing the design projects from Wednesday and announcing the Slow Homer of the Week!
