Freshome.com
We’re always on the lookout for good design blogs (if you have one send me a link at martin at supernaturalagency dot com). Freshome.com has a great perspective and a sense of humor. Check out a few stories:
- The most stupid piece of eco-friendly furniture
- Contemporary Kitchen in Bamboo
- Modern Wooden Sink Made in Stone Rain : Ebony
and plenty more.
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101 Cookbooks
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Today’s cutting edge chef’s on how they designed their home kitchens
Metropolis magazine has a great article on how today’s best restaurant chef’s approached designing their kitchens. Learn how Alice Waters, Dan Barber, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne went about developing their kitchens.
Alice Waters:
“The kitchen is way too small! In terms of space, it needs to be almost as big as the dining room. It has a fireplace —about four feet tall and five feet wide—that is like a regular open fire with just a chimney and a large opening where the grills and turning spits are. There is also a long table that the dishwashers have access to on the left side; the cooks are on the cooking line to the right. And of course there’s a table up front where we display some of the food we’re serving, like fruits and vegetables—whatever we have on the menu we put out on the table. The making of pastries should really be all in its own little room, but we’ve never had that luxury, so it’s kind of at the end of the kitchen. We also have a special room where we make ice cream, and we have another room that’s only for rolling out dough.”
Grant Achatz:
“I wanted to be able to put down ten, twenty, thirty plates at one time and have cooks surrounding them on all sides, working on them in groups. That told me I needed long islands to allow cooks to be on each side; so you see the two twenty-two-foot-long islands that run down each side.”
Dan Barber:
“A lot of what we cook here is in sous-vide [ vacuum-sealed] bags. And then we steam it in combination ovens at a very low temperature. We’re cooking at 132 degrees Fahrenheit—it’s like a bathtub. This is highly technologically advanced; it’s the future of cooking. And ultimately what we’re doing is trying to create this dichotomy between the old-world agrarian ideals of growing your own food—and growing it sustainably, organically, locally, all of that—but then coming into a kitchen where there’s modern technology, and using techniques that are innovative and technologically advanced. Some people would view that as contradictory, but I see it as one and the same. “
Wylie Dufresne:
“Our kitchen is extremely functional. At first glance it doesn’t seem that different from a lot of others because it is laid out in the same way as a European-style kitchen: it’s broken down into multiple stations. The hot line is designed so that the four stations are identical in terms of the equipment that stands in front of the cook. Each cook has his or her own flattop, oven door, reach-in refrigerator, three doors of refrigeration, and two bays of countertop refrigeration. The idea is that regardless of the station, the mise en place [ingredient selection] changes but the layout stays the same, so you can move from station to station with a certain familiarity. That’s a very practical way of thinking about it. “
The article is a must read and includes some great photos. And check out Metropolis- they are leaders in journalism about Green building practices which will be a driving force in kitchen design and technology.
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