Mobalpa Traditional French Kitchen Designs
2 February 2010
“Done Deal”
I have encountered any number of country kitchens with American motifs that I found myself liking quite a bit, but I have to confess that the country kitchens I find most charming are those in Europe, especially France and Italy. Some of those kitchens, of course, have been in existence for centuries, which certainly adds to their charm, but even the brand new designs, if they are designed as farmhouse kitchens, have in them so much of the charm of that which is old.
The whole concept of kitchens, of course, is as old as housing itself, although in the beginning, a kitchen, if one could call it that, was really not much more than a kettle on a hook by a fireplace. Man, think of the “fun” of cooking in a kitchen like that one! But for a long time now, we have had the luxury, for such it is, of kitchens that have been carefully designed to accommodate the needs of the cook. The difference is day and night over what went before. But along with the new, it is nice, from time to time, to soak up some of the old, and that takes us back to where we began, with a discussion on French country kitchens.
Mobalpa, like so many other European kitchen makers in the vanguard of kitchen design is one of those who has concept after concept after variation on a concept. Honest to goodness, whenever I find myself feeling rather full of myself, all I have to do is click on to one of those sites to just smash down any thought I might ever have had of being one with an original concept. I do have ideas from time to time, but when I do manage to come up with one, I’m like the guy you see in the movies set in the 1800s who’s making a fire in the frozen northwest somewhere. You know what I’m talking about, the guy who knocks a piece of steel against a flint until he makes a spark into a bit of cloth waste of some sort or dry twigs and then he’s blowing on it ever so gently to make sure the flame survives long enough to catch the wood. Got him? Well, that’s me with an idea pretty much. But these people just crank ‘em out!
One of the concepts I really like about French and Italian farmhouse kitchens is the dining table in the kitchen. Actually, our kitchen was designed that way in the beginning, but it was so small that it really never worked well, which is true of most of the eat-in-the-kitchen designs I’ve seen in the USA. They always seem to be something of an afterthought, something just shoehorned into the kitchen because the people who built the house were too cheap to provide a formal dining room.
The French and Italians, by way of decided contrast, feel that the dining table should be an integral part of the kitchen, and they design it accordingly. Mobalpa, as I stated earlier, has any number of basic designs for their French farmhouse kitchens, along with the usual blizzard of variations on a theme, but the one thing all of these designs have in common is the mental image they evoke of an aproned matron with floured hands singing out, “C’mon in, sit yourself down, consider yourself part of the family, consider yourself at home.” Consider it done!
Joseph
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