YesterTec Kitchen Workstation Furniture
7 June 2010
“That’s Old Fashioned”
Just last week I was talking about the utter endlessness and variety of kitchen design, but today I would like to return to a company that is rapidly becoming an old favorite, namely YesterTec. What they have done is reduce a kitchen to its essentials and then pop those essentials into a cabinet of some sort, which looks like nothing more than, well, a cabinet of some sort.
It is, as I said in my earlier blogs on the subject, a concept that lends itself to a number of wonderful ideas, one of which is simply using the YesterTec Armoire mini-kitchen as part of the Great Room I have many times discussed in these blogs. 
Do the math with me for a moment. How much time do you, on average, spend cooking in your kitchen? And let’s define cooking, because putting on a pot of coffee and pouring cereal into a bowl is not cooking. That’s baching it, really. No, you’ve gotta break out some pots and pans, maybe dice some stuff, arrange the meat and vegetables just so, regulate the flames, spend an hour or two at it-that’s cooking. And on that basis, how much, really, do you do? So how much kitchen do you need? So, that’s the company and the concept as I saw it being used, which generated my previous blogs (you can link to the first one here and the second one here, if you’re interested). Well now, by gosh, YesterTec has come up with nothing less than a sort of stylized time machine.
The house at the top of this blog is the subject of their journey into the past. It’s part of a Pennsylvania German working farm and was built in 1804. Time marched on, and it was eventually renovated to be used as a home for a tenant (the owners living in another house across the lane), which included installing some makeshift cabinetry for a primitive kitchen. Just recently the owners sold the house across the lane where they had lived and moved into the 1804 house, which called for another renovation. Since it was to be their retirement home they wanted the kitchen to be as modern as possible, but the
y also wanted to retain the charm of an old stone house built two centuries earlier.
There is a mindset that simply guts the interior and replaces it with all new. They did not want to do this. There is another mindset that says, “If a pot by the fire was good enough for the original owners, it’s good enough for me.” That is not, I hasten to add, an especially widespread mindset, but it does exist. In any case, they elected to simply retain as much of the ambience of the old as possible while still installing that which is modern, which they were able to do by creating a keeping room that contains kitchen, dining room, and a seating area in front of the original stone fireplace. And, in effect, they have made the old new again.
A keeping room is an area just off the kitchen. It dates back to Colonial times and was developed because their only heating was the fireplace in the kitchen. So the families would sleep in this room, especially in the winter months. Over time keeping rooms became the place where the family gathered, making it a forerunner of the Great Room a fair number of kitchen designers (especially those in Europe) have been developing in recent years. A Great Room is a room that combines kitchen, living room, and dining room, and what makes it “Great” is the fact that family gathers there, as opposed to simply shuffling off into individual rooms to while away the hours with Internet chitchat.
But to return this to the old house renovation, once the owners had decided on a keeping room they then had to furnish it with appliances that would either be in keeping (sorry!) with the old house (pots by the fire) or hidden from view when not in use. And if the latter, they would have to be housed in something either old or that looked old. The solution, of course, (I can say that because I’ve
peeked at the answer!) was YesterTec.
By utilizing YesterTec’s Kitchen Workstation Furniture they were able to create a kitchen area that is both modern and in keeping with the ancient structure in which it resides. YesterTec’s president, David Beer says, “The close integration of the living area and the kitchen illustrates why we created Kitchen Workstation Furniture in the first place. We are not always cooking in a room like this, so it is nice not to have the continuous cabinets and countertops and the modern appliances exposed to the seating areas. In addition, the efficiency of our workstations makes this small kitchen function very well. But most importantly, the architecture of the room remains uncompromised.” Which is to say, old fashioned. That’ll work. I still hold hands with my wife in the movie show!
Joseph
Leave a Reply
One Response to “YesterTec Kitchen Workstation Furniture”
June 7th, 2010 at 6:57 AM
Is that a melamine box wrapped in wood? Hiding stuff like dishwashers and microwaves in cabinets just does not work for me.
So Joseph, would it be considered cooking if you pour the hot coffee over the cereal?
Joe