Sheer Spherical Kitchen
21 November 2008
“Courage, Lads”
Sheer Kitchens is a kitchen concept that I wrote about in the early weeks of this website, and I am revisiting it. I came back to this kitchen for two reasons, really. First, because it is one of the most intriguing ide
as I have yet seen—and by now, trust me, I’ve seen a lot of them. But more to the point, it illustrates what can be done with an imagination when you decide not to limit it to simply doing whatever has been done before. And yes, I do know this kitchen is more expensive than most of us can afford. But it has features that just have me blowing my mind here!
This kitchen requires so little space that I could easily drop it into our own postage stamp of a kitchen and have room left over for… pretty much everything. On the one hand the counters would be gone. And a fair 
amount of storage space. But that’s not as bad as it might seem because an unseemly portion of our existing kitchen storage space contains items that have not seen the light of day for fifteen years.
The Sheer Spherical Kitchen is state-of-the-art, both in design and in the carbon fiber they used for much of the construction because it’s lighter and more resistant than stainless steel. The freestanding wall unit can be closed completely with a motorized roller shutter. Inside it are four folding chairs of aluminum and natural leather. This unit is also the area where one finds the oven, coffee machine, a bar, microwave, refrigerator, and dishwasher. An
d they have provided plenty of storage space for glasses, plates, bottles, and pots, along with two large drawers for pans and kitchen equipment. They’ve even thought of a folding pantry.
When it’s closed, the sphere part looks like some sort of giant egg, but when you’re ready to cook, the top can be raised to the ceiling, and it then doubles as a ventilation hood, with lighting for the cooking area. The stove has four burners and plenty of food preparation space, believe it or not. They have a steel pull-out table and two trolley tables, one for kitchen equipment storage, the other for waste collection. There’s also a sink at one end. And when it’s not in use for cooking, the closed-up sphere functions as a lamp that produces a soft light to diffuse through one’s personal paradise!
Is it a kitchen you would really want for yourself? I don’t know. How do you live? No, really, how do you live? Do you eat a lot of take-out and run through the house in the morning on work days, stopping for only a cup of coffee, if that? Then, really now, how much kitchen do you really need? Where do you live? Big house, small house, modern, 
not so modern? If you could do anything with it, what would you do? Are you one of those who, like my wife and I, really prefer the movies to just about anything? Then maybe you should make your TV room your large room and your kitchen a bit smaller. Heck, with a kitchen like this one, you could make it very small indeed. And with the space thus saved, you could do other things.
And this ill-defined “other things” is the whole reason I wanted to revisit this concept, because it takes kitchens as we know them and does something else altogether with them. How viable is this concept for you particularly? It doesn’t matter. Does it get you thinking? Then it does matter.
I write about a lot of concepts that really push the envelope, that go in directions I’m quite sure I wouldn’t take for myself, but it’s more than window shopping. Studying what’s out there emboldens me to one day design for my wife a kitchen that makes, however timidly, my own statement. And perhaps it encourages you.
Joseph
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