What a Kitchen Is Actually For

Designing for the choreography, not the layout.

The dominant images of kitchens come from showrooms and from photography, and both are concerned with how a kitchen looks when it is empty and still. A kitchen is almost never empty and still. It is a room in constant motion, and what determines whether it works is less the arrangement of the cabinetry than the choreography that arrangement produces.

Choreography is the right word, because the movements are repeated and sequential. Someone comes in with shopping and needs a surface within a step of the door, or the bags go on the floor. Vegetables move from that surface to the sink, from the sink to a board, from the board to the hob, and the offcuts need to reach a bin without crossing the room. Something comes out of the oven and needs somewhere heatproof to land immediately, not two metres away.

Each movement is short. What matters is how they intersect. In a kitchen that works, two people can carry out different sequences at once without meeting. In a kitchen that does not, opening the fridge blocks the route to the hob, and one person's Tuesday evening is a series of small collisions with another person's.

The bin is the clearest version of this. It is the least glamorous item in the room and it dictates more than almost anything else. If it sits under the sink and the prep space is across the island, every piece of preparation involves either carrying waste over or letting it accumulate on the board. The fix is a bin drawer within the prep run, which is trivial, but it has to be decided when the cabinetry is laid out.

Prep space is routinely underestimated. Eight metres of worktop can leave a working area of 700mm once the hob,

sink and appliances have taken their share. The number that matters is the longest uninterrupted stretch, and it belongs between the sink and the hob, because that is where the work goes.

Then there is everything the kitchen does that is not cooking. Homework, post, a child watched while something else is done, people standing and talking while somebody cooks. Those uses are real and need designing for rather than tolerating. Usually that means accepting a surface understood from the outset as the place where life lands, so the working areas can stay clear. A kitchen with no designated place for clutter does not become a kitchen without clutter. It becomes a kitchen where the clutter is on the prep run.

The showroom question is what the kitchen should contain. The more useful question is what happens in this room between six and eight on a weekday evening, with these particular people in it, and what would make that hour easier.