Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rise of the open kitchen

eater.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#41

Post by m463 »

prawn wrote: post #36
lc9er wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is the opposite. It’s a nightmare of noise, where everyone is forced to be louder than everyone else. Anyone trying to read or do homework is forced to flee to the edges of the house to find an escape.

Don't people wanting to read in peace just do it in their room? There are social activities in the open plan area (cooking together, painting, crafting, etc) and then anyone working or reading is often doing it in their room or the home office.

I agree. I just think the kitchen can be a social focus with the open plan.

This is not intended to be like open plan office seating, where nobody can escape. This should be combined with appropriate quiet places too.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#42

Post by mantas »

faitswulff wrote: post #2

I was hoping this was going to talk about the increasingly trendy open kitchen concept in homes, or more specifically answer the question: why have kitchens traditionally been separated from dining areas in the first place? Unfortunately, the article is about restaurants.

Same here! Talking about traditional setup…

It probably varies from place to place? Here in north-east europe traditional peasant setup was kitchen and living room together. Kitchen stove was used to heat the house as well. Usually houses would have cold side and warm side. Warm side was warmed up while cooking. People would also sleep in the warm side during the winter.

It only started to change in 20th century with people moving to apartments or building fancier houses en masse.

However by the end of 20th century people were already gravitating back to the usual setup of joint kitchen and living room. Which is the norm in new buildings for the past 20 years or so.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#43

Post by mantas »

bombcar wrote: post #24
faitswulff wrote: post #2

I was hoping this was going to talk about the increasingly trendy open kitchen concept in homes, or more specifically answer the question: why have kitchens traditionally been separated from dining areas in the first place? Unfortunately, the article is about restaurants.

Many good reasons below - but another one is that framing large rooms is (was) expensive until pretty close to modern times with laminated beams, etc. So you'd want to make as many smaller rooms as you could already just for cost reasons, and so making everything a separate room followed pretty closely. Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often do…

I doubt bigger rooms was hard to build. Here in north-east Europe traditional wooden houses were essentially 2 big rooms on either side. With entrance and storage in the middle.

One side was kitchen and living room while the other was „cold“ and usually not used much during the winter.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#44

Post by mantas »

prawn wrote: post #30
bombcar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many good reasons below - but another one is that framing large rooms is (was) expensive until pretty close to modern times with laminated beams, etc. So you'd want to make as many smaller rooms as you could already just for cost reasons, and so making everything a separate room followed pretty closely. Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often do…

Also easier to heat or cool smaller spaces. In the case of a kitchen, you can isolate and exhaust heat.

In my parts of the world it was the opposite. Kitchen and living room was traditionally joint. To use kitchen heat in winter to heat up the living area. Usually people would also sleep in the same room during winter.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#45

Post by bombcar »

mantas wrote: post #43
bombcar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many good reasons below - but another one is that framing large rooms is (was) expensive until pretty close to modern times with laminated beams, etc. So you'd want to make as many smaller rooms as you could already just for cost reasons, and so making everything a separate room followed pretty closely. Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often do…

I doubt bigger rooms was hard to build. Here in north-east Europe traditional wooden houses were essentially 2 big rooms on either side. With entrance and storage in the middle. One side was kitchen and living room while the other was „cold“ and usually not used much during the winter.

It depends on the era and the local supply - if you’re building your own house out of your own logs you can likely source quite long trees - in a pine forest.

If you’re going stickbuild at the turn of the century, getting large beams from the sawmill would still be costly. Especially over 20/30 feet.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#46

Post by bombcar »

mantas wrote: post #44
prawn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also easier to heat or cool smaller spaces. In the case of a kitchen, you can isolate and exhaust heat.

In my parts of the world it was the opposite. Kitchen and living room was traditionally joint. To use kitchen heat in winter to heat up the living area. Usually people would also sleep in the same room during winter.

There were much more region variations on house styles before HVAC conquered everything and Nate it irrelevant.

Modern energy saving building is often reverting to pre-A/C designs - of which one of the tricks is various rooms of various sizes for different times of the day.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#47

Post by MichaelRo »

least wrote: post #39
MichaelRo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the article is at best incomplete, there's open kitchens in restaurants but an increasingly annoying trend is encountering them in private homes. The reason for private home open kitchens is simple: greed on part of the real estate developers. Like office open spaces, it's easier and cheaper to develop them, less work, less material, these motherfuckers would sell you a cube of concrete and call it "home" if the…

What exactly is a closed kitchen? One with doors completely shutting it off from the rest of the home? That seems to be exceptionally rare in the US. So much so I don't think I've ever been into any home that that was the case. There's of course ones with and without walls that partition it off from the rest of the living space, but I can't remember the last time i saw a door on one. Even when I lived in Germany, whi…

>> What exactly is a closed kitchen? One with doors completely shutting it off from the rest of the home?

Precisely. My apartment has 55 square meters in all and was pretty expensive as is. My cousin who lives in Paris in a 30 meters (yes, 30 square meters!) apartment was thinking to move to an 80 square meters apartment and was asked €1,000,000 for it (one million, yes, ridiculous but these are the prices). And his 30 meters is close to half a million! So space in major cities is very expensive.

Thus having a closed kitchen effectively gains another room, I have one bedroom and a retractable couch in the living room. Because the kitchen is separated by actual walls, I have sort of a two-bedroom apartment. Two people can sleep in different rooms and it's possible to go into the kitchen or prepare food without bothering them. That becomes especially important when one has kids.

I love how you love your open space kitchens, I dare you do that with kids in a 50 square meters apartment! On the other hand gipsy lifestyle is a thing, extended family of 15 in a tent around the fire, gotta love that.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#49

Post by toyg »

randomdata wrote: post #10
ip26 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why have kitchens traditionally been separated from dining areas in the first place? Not long ago, cooking was often done exclusively by “the help”.

The cooking is still exclusively done by "the help" in restaurants, but the article indicates that the theatre, so to speak, of food preparation has come to be considered a desirable trait by those occupying the dining room. So this doesn't quite answer why they settled on keeping it hidden instead of a display of entertainment. There is no reason to think people in that time wouldn't have found the same enjoyment in…

> it's just what one notable person happened to decide

Oh no. Chances are the real engine of this change is the recent mass-media discovery of food-prep as a heroic and cool activity.

Celebrity chefs used to be obnoxious, "always-be-prepared", by-the-book home-goddess archetypes like Delia Smith; at some point over the last 25 years, they turned into sexy, improvising, creative rockstars. The creativity-impoverished masses, bored to death by day after day looking at computer screens, now get their kicks by eating and cooking.

Re: The rise of the open kitchen

#50

Post by osigurdson »

Swizec wrote: post #29
osigurdson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think detached houses with yards are better.

Nah detached houses with yards are the worst of both worlds. You get neither the easily accessible town/city experience nor enough land to do anything interesting with. But I’m probably biased because I grew up in a city and regularly visited grandparents with legit farms. If you’re gonna have land, it should support at least a decent-sized garden … maybe a few fruit trees, nice shed, couple chickens. You definitely…

Acreages are better still, I agree.
Post reply on HN