The Work Station
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday September 19, 1997
The "centre" of the house needs careful consideration, writes LUCY JACKSON.
A kitchen is for hard work. Even though people are increasingly buying take-aways or semi-prepared foods, the kitchen is the centre of the home if not the house.
In The Old Days, kitchens were little lean-to affairs tacked onto the back of the house and "designed" to break the back - and the spirit - of the hardiest housewife.
Nowadays kitchens are designed to be the hub of the household, open to a family room that perhaps flows into the back garden. And many a builder is doing well from the proceeds of massive alterations to achieve the same effect in older houses where once light and air were not high priorities.
So, with kitchens very much open to public gaze, much agonising and even more dollars go into their design and construction.
Form and function are old friends, but often fashion has a way of triumphing over everything, particularly in kitchens where the range of materials and appliances is vast and confusing.
It's still possible to find a "classic" kitchen with off-white gloss painted timber cupboards with glass inserts - you can chance upon them in old flats in suburbs such as Edgecliff - that would look just as much at home in a mansion in London. And, unfortunately, it's equally possible to still find kitchens from the "Sydney nuts and berries" school of design, made fashionable when chianti bottles with melted candles were considered sophisticated.
We have, thank heavens, come a long way from that and now we can spend Saturdays - lots and lots of Saturdays - wandering among the gleaming, glittering showrooms kitchens that fire the imagination and wondering how far we can make $25,000 go.
Mollie Samson is a designer with the Sydney Kitchen Centre so we asked her to give us a check list of what's popular these days - and what will remain popular.
To get down to the real basics, she says, kitchens designed by professionals are now likely to to be far more practical than, say, a decade ago. Then, men who had only ever prepared the odd Vegemite sandwich were designing kitchens that weren't entirely practical and often merely replaced what had been there before. Nowadays younger men who actually use their own kitchens and women who presumably have kitchen designing built into their genes have taken over.
"It's very popular now to integrate everything," says Samson, "so you never know where the damn things are - well, fridges are not things you want to look at, especially if you have one of those open plan kitchens.
"And people would really love not to have to put in an oven - they'd rather be out of the terrace using the barbecue if they have to cook at all - but they're not game to because they are always thinking of the resale value of the house." (It's a very Sydney sort of attitude, thinking of resale before even moving in!)
Companies advertising home gym equipment are making a bomb, but kitchen-appliance buyers insist on wall ovens "because they don't want to bend over all the time. But the good old upright stoves has virtually gone to heaven because those gaps on each side just collect a lot of junk anyway".
A glance at ads in the "houses for sale" section will reveal how many boast "European appliances" as a great selling point and Samson laments the marked preference for European over Australian-made appliances, when the former cannot "cater to the simple grilled cheese on toast and has much smaller ovens, although people don't seem to realise that".
In cupboards, "real timber comes and goes but at the moment beech veneer and lighter colours are popular in straight doors. Grooved doors are losing favour because they're harder to keep clean in all those little corners and people don't have time for that sort of stuff."
Lacquer doors still have their fans, but the nightclub approach in high gloss is losing out to a satin finish "and I advise against lacquer if they have kids".
The big mover is gleaming stainless steel, which is "seducing people in the showroom", she says. "Little do they know that the merest hint of a passing greasy cloth will put marks all over it!"
Still, a particularly popular combination is sleek stainless steel in fitting and rangehoods, combined with the richness of black granite benchtops and the warmth of timber.
Timber floors are still "all the rage", says Samson, " and it does look lovely". Nevertheless she advises it is best left to other parts of the house, especially if the kitchen leads directly into the outdoors.
So ceramic tiles in soft and natural tones are most likely to get the Samson nod, rather than the terracotta variety which "are quite porous so everyone will know when you've dropped your red wine all over it. And, if someone is on a budget, there's nothing wrong with cork tiles - they can look nice if they are maintained properly."
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
