I'd rather have family members reaching across a sink to hand me something than reaching across a stove. Additionally, the island can be used for quite a few other things - as a dining area, as a party serving area, as a place to play board games, or generally as just an ideal place to gather around, set drinks, and give each other dumb looks. Most hosts generally don't want that hot cooktop *between* them and their guests while they're preparing the evening meal. Similarly, my grill is generally placed such that the front of the grill is facing the logical gathering area, and the back of the grill is towards the edge of the deck. No ventilation hood is necessary - it's just much more "group friendly" to turn away from your guests for brief periods of time rather than staring at them over or through the smoke of burning fat as it flares up from dripping onto the flavorizer bars.

My best friend's parents have a very nice home with the sink against the window and the cooktop on the island. It's an electric cooktop, so right up front, they're not serious about cooking; I've seen it used as a table surface for art, crafts, homework, etc. There is no hood over top of the cooking area - but then, it's electric, so it's not like you'd need one anyways.

 

I don't buy any of this.

For starters, the tiny, urban kitchens in the three apartments in which I seriously learned to embrace cooking (Hoboken, UES, Wrigleyville) all lacked external exhaust above the range. Yes, there were many smoke-alarm moments. But I checked the NEC, and it's not specifically prohibited to place AC-powered smoke alarms on switched circuits. Just put a switch on the island next to the switch which controls the fan in the vent hood. To wit:






Not buying the grotesque monolith argument.





Serious question: Why?

Serious question: Why?

 

Joe's house design:





All fires to the middle of the room!!

 

Honestly, I would agree with you, Joe. The issue I see is the ventilation blocks the open-concept most consumers are after. Further, those downdraft systems are inefficient so the ultimate compromise is to put the sink in the center. In my experience, it is easier to have a conversation over cleaning up some dishes than focusing on a serious conversation while cooking.

 

As a parent of a very active child, I appreciate having hot pans full of boiling liquid tucked away next to a wall, rather than placed in the center of a large room with nothing to shield them.

Open plan kitchens are stupid because you've immediately blown away something like a third of your available cabinet storage, meaning that you need to decdicate more square footage of your house to achieve the same utility level of the kitchen. They're also stupid because when I'm cooking something, the last thing I want is for everyone in the house to be yammering away at me. Give me some space to work.

You're probably one of those people who think open plan offices are great too, aren't you?

--Ian

 

Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Also, ceiling heights were still within reason (8'-10') in both of those. Show me a decent looking pic of one where the ceiling height is in the 12'-14' range. Besides the elephant in the room distraction, how does one even properly brace/support a pendulum hanging from a high ceiling such that it does not move laterally when the operator touches it?

 

I prefer not to be burdened with watching the hired help prepare my meals. Used to be so much easier when you had a Breezeway between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Scuse me while I retire to The Parlor.

 

Where I started this year, I thought I would hate it, but it's not bad. I sit next to a giant wall of windows and can see downtown and the Capitol building. If I don't want to hear other people I'll go grab one of the individual conference rooms or put on my headphones. But on any given day 50% or more of the people are working from home.

But being a Tech Writer it's sometimes good because QA, Devs, etc, may be discussing a feature/fix/etc that I'm documenting and may pick something up I hadn't heard before, or leads me to ask more questions.

Also, here is an absolutely disgusting building in OKC. Cheap ripoff of the Frank Lloyd Wright building that is in Bartlesville, OK.




The Price Tower.

 

 

^Middle-class folks wouldn't typically have live in help.

 

I don't even know why we're discussing kitchens when the biggest issue with contemporary house design is the ubiquity of giant master bathrooms with monstrous elevated spa/whirlpool/tub things. Spending hours in a giant bubble bath is not luxury, it's what a poor person imagines luxury must be. Real luxury is having an efficiently laid out floor plan that provides adequate and appropriate space for storage and normal daily activities. I spend about 20 minutes a day in the bathroom; I don't need a tub big enough to swim laps in, nor do I need a bathroom counter longer than a shuffleboard.



This example is not the worst offender by far, but it demonstrates the point. This is actually in a house we might consider. However, while the house is 1900+ sq ft, it's only 3 bedrooms, without even a bonus room or office to speak of. Look at the stupid arrangement with all of that wasted space directly behind the tub, and consider that even more space is wasted since the tub itself juts out into the rest of the bathroom.

 

How quaint.

And they likely wouldn't have breezeways separating the kitchen from the rest of the house.

But that, I say, that is how we do it down here.

 

Not a fan of the conversation pit, but I dig the overall vibe.




1: The hood shall be mounted above eye-level. Specifically, above *my* eye-level. That covers 95% of humans. I've been in two homes (of friends down in FL) whose kitchens had an island cooktop and a tall hood. Both were awesome.

2: Personal experience as an adult visiting home at the holidays: The kitchen in my sister's house is of a semi-open design. (It opens out into the dining room, and tangentially into the living room.) And around Christmastime, cooking is always taking place. Much conversation occurs during the cooking process. Less so during the cleanup process, as people are stuffed and otherwise engaged.




Fair enough. I got snipped years ago, and I'm done with being the step-dad. Not a concern.


This is very true. You do have to dedicate more floor space to make it a workable design. The house I just rented in NC has an island kitchen, and yet it also has more countertop and storage space (including a walk-in pantry) than any other I've occupied. Very much looking forward to breaking it in, even if the sink & cooktop are reversed.



Depends on your definition of "open plan."

Most people think "tech startup" when they hear this. Huge benches, zero personal space. Not a fan.



Back in NYC, the engineering management office was of a semi-open plan. Here's what it looked like in CAD:



Each desk had a partition which was about top-of-head high, with clear glass for the upper 12". This was perfect. You still have your space, but if you need to ask the IT boss if his folks are screwing with the extranet router, you just stand up and ask. The big table in the middle was awesome. Held several E-size plots, and allowed for easy collaboration. Big whiteboards near the door and behind my desk that got used a lot. I loved that layout.


At my current gig, I have an office with a door. My VP has an office with a door. So do my IT manager, my media manager, and so on. I hate it. My office is nice, but not all prison cells need be dank and smelly. I spend as little time as possible there, as I feel like a rat in a cage.


Back at Harris, we had cubicles. They were large cubicles, but still cubicles. I dismantled the outward-facing wall of mine, and re-arranged the interior bits so that I faced outwards when sitting at my desk, with the "tinkering with ****" area in the rear. Loved it.





1: This is a mechanical engineering problem, not a human-factors problem.

2: Why would the chef be touching the hood? On the nice models, the fan & lighting are controlled remotely, by switches mounted on the island. Also, the bulk of the mass (the fan & motor assembly) are mounted up in the attic, not in the hood itself.

 

I'm a software guy. That means I spend large amount of time staring at a screen, juggling complex relationships between a dozen or so different moving parts in my head. People 10 feet away from me having inane conversations (or even legimate, work-related conversations) are very, very distracting.

I'd love to have an office with a door I could close again. I had one for about 2 years when I worked at Qualcomm in the mid 90s, and it's been cubes ever since. I hate it.

--Ian

 

Completely agreed here. The bathroom in my new place has a huge tub, and as a result, a smaller-than-optimum shower:



I don't like it, but I get that it's an impulsive selling-point.

Doesn't bother me that much, as I don't consider the bathroom to be a major focal-point of social life, nor a place in which I spend recreational time. I ****, I shower, I brush my teeth. As a general rule, I prefer to spend as little time in the bathroom as possible, regardless of layout.

That would be in contrast to the kitchen, which is a major recreational area in which I enjoy spending time. I'm already mentally working up the layout, and have idented the new stand-mixer I intend to buy, along with the articulating arm for the tablet. The speaker layout will be perfect.

 

If other people can see me browsing mt.net at work then it's too open.
​​​​​​

 

With a reasonably good pair of binoculars, a fair number of people in the Pfizer world headquarters building on the north side of 42nd street between 1st and 2nd Aves could have seen me browsing MT.



Not really worried about that, in much the same way that the fine-looking young woman who lived on the 10th floor of the building just to the west of Pfizer didn't seem all that worried about us watching her get out of the shower every morning from the newsroom. With the $16,000 telephoto lens.

 

back to the wall, my brother

 

In Peru, almost all middle class folk have live-in help. Not going to complain about the "Third World"

 

It was really meant to be a joke since most of the plebs think bourgeois means rich/super rich when it really means bored/materialistic members of the middle-class.