Earth Day 2011 Electrolux Live-In Room Kitchen Designs
31 March 2011
This week has been given over to an Earth Day Celebration suggested to us by BLANCO AMERICA. I am privileged to sit on their Design Council, and they have asked us to submit tips for the ecology. In keeping with that theme, I have been re-cycling some blogs that related to this subject. One of the more intriguing concepts I have yet encountered in this three-year-plus blogging adventure is the concept of a room that encompasses kitchen, dining room, and family room. As it turns out, it is an idea both ancient and brand-new, as I discovered when I did some research for the following blog.
“The Evolution of a Revolution”
To say that Electrolux promotes kitchen designs is to do them both a service and an injury. They much prefer the term Live-In Room, which is more than a clever trademarked term. It’s an entirely new way of thinking abut a room that is itself both old and new.
I’m not really sure how Adam and Eve did their cooking-the Bible just discusses their wardrobe-but whenever the process began, it was little more than a pot by a fire. Kitchens themselves came much later and for most of the succeeding centuries, they were little more than a controlled fire of some sort and a simple table. Modern kitchens owe a lot to the Hoosier cabinet. These were sold to homeowners during the first two decades of the 20th Century, and at the time this product was marketed kitchens really just consisted of a stove, icebox, and maybe a table and chairs. Dishes and canned goods went on a few crude shelves. But from this germ of an idea grew the idea of the built-in cabinetry that is the heart of the modern kitchen. But now kitchens are changing again, and changing to such an extent that Electrolux now speaks of the ideal being not a kitchen but a Live-In Room. So, what is that exactly?
One of the things that really surprised my wife and me when we had our house warming party was the utter impossibility of getting people out of the kitchen. It’s a small space, but it does have a nice counter, and we ended up with people sitting at the counter while we were inside the kitchen serving various snacks. And no matter how late it got, that’s where people stayed that night. I bring that up because the people at Electrolux would be the first to tell us that what we have here is not so much a kitchen as the beginning of a Live-In Room. What’s the difference? In a nutshell, the traditional kitchen we actually have is where kitchens have been. The Live-In Room is where they are going. And I find it interesting that, even though they are the makers of a long line of innovative-and fairly pricey-kitchen appliances, Electrolux acknowledges that oftentimes these days people are using their kitchens to simply zap something or, worse, to simply consume take-out food. Which begs the question, I suppose, why a kitchen? I mean, really, if that’s all you’re “cooking,” you’re really not. And that, in turn brings us back to their philosophy-because it’s really more than just a design statement-of a Live-In Room as opposed to a kitchen.
Really, you’ll have to go to their website to follow their argument, but what they have to say makes a lot of sense. More and more, people are using kitchens more for gathering places. In fact there are now a fair number of people with second kitchens where the actual cooking is being done, thereby maintaining the appearance of the new gathering place, the kitchen!
That jibes with our own experiences. My wife very much likes being at the counter while she prepares food, so she can look across the adjoining family room and see the big-screen TV, and even if it’s just golf (Just golf! How can anyone SAY that!), she does not feel isolated in the kitchen, anymore than she does when company arrives and the two of us entertain while cooking! And that is very much where Electrolux is going with this. Electrolux thinks of the kitchen-sorry, the Live-In Room-as a place where life happens.
I wanted to end this with something clever suggested by the title, and my first thought was to say that we have gone from burning our food to cooking it to nuking it. But, really, it is much more a matter of changing affections. Think back to the pot by the fire. It was often a fireplace that dominated the room in which it resided, and it became the center of the home, especially in the winter months when it gave both warmth and light during the lengthened evenings when books were often read aloud, and various types of handiwork were done by the flickering light. Then food preparation was done in a room apart and often became, in consequence, more of a labor. And now it is again where it began, but the load is lightened this time with modern appliances and modern sensibilities, and people often congregate there, as in times of yore. So we have gone from hearth, to apart, to heart.
Joseph
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