Ateliers-Jean-Daniel Kitchen Design
17 November 2008
“Think, Thank”
What I find particularly interesting is the way ideas go in and out of vogue. I have heard, although I can’t really confirm it, that skirt lengths go up and d
own with the stock market. However, I can say absolutely that short skirts have been in style at least three times during my lifetime, so there’s been some enjoyable moments along the way as I’ve made my way through this vale of tears. But I digress.
I started out to say that kitchen designs have gone through any number of changes—and will surely go through many more. First, in all honesty, there was no kitchen at all, or at least not one in the house. In Colonial times, for those who could afford two structures, food preparation took place in the cooking house, which was removed from the main house for fear of fire. It was only with a great deal of trepidation that kitchens were introduced into up-scale homes, and the first such kitchens were rather primitive affairs. Later, kitchens did become more elaborate, and the blessings of an organized space for food preparation began to trickle down to the working class.
The Hoosier Cabinet was introduced at the turn of the 20th century, and it did a lot to revolutionize both kitchens and the lives of women, since it was still mainly they who did the cooking for the family. I’ve written about it before, because it’s another concept I find interesting, but here I’ll just 
say that the Hoosier Cabinet was, in many ways, the forerunner of kitchen cabinets themselves. Nowadays, of course, uniform kitchen cabinets are de rigueur. There is an undoubted practicality to this concept, especially for kitchens as small as ours, but they’re not exactly cutting edge innovative, so I have tended to stay away from them when choosing topics for these blogs.
Another concept that is now coming into vogue, though, is the mismatched kitchen, a concept first championed by Johnny Grey, a British kitchen designer who is doing some marvelous things. And now we have the idea of Old World Kitchens, something that would have been made for a French kitchen, say, several centuries ago.
That last one, particularly, is a fascinating concept, and it makes its cft411.com début now. Actually, Jean Daniel Ateliers (workshops) is a French company with a number of models for this particular kitchen design concept, all of them stunning and quite a bit different from what we are accustomed to in the United States.
There are so many wonderful design details in these kitchen designs that I hardly know where to begin. Jean Daniel Ateliers is one of the leading companies on the Continent, and looking at their work, it’s not hard to figure out why they are. Nowadays, of course, even so-called faceframe cabinets use Blum hinges, which are hidden inside the doors, so seeing exposed hinges on these cabinets is something of a treat. It’s even more of a treat for an old cabinetmaker like myself, because these are clearly NOT cheap two-dollar, self-closing hinges! And the details of the arched openings for the stoves and open shelves instead of wall cabinets are Old Country—there’s no other way to describe it.
Another thing I particularly like is the total absence of Lazy Susan shelves for the closed-end cabinets. They’re dead corners, really, and these people were wise enough not to pour more money into them!
But the most intriguing element of all—for me, at least—is the built-in cabinets. And let’s explain that term because the built-in cabinets we use in this country are only built-in in the sense of being fastened to the walls and fitted into the kitchen. But if you look closely at these pictures, you will note that a number of the individual cases have actually been built into the walls. An honest-to-god built-in kitchen. Who’d of thunk it?
Joseph
No comments yet