From voice-controlled appliances to fridges that track ingredients, smart kitchens are transforming the way we cook and our relationships with our kitchens, as the spaces become more intuitive, personalised, and integrated into daily life.
“Not only can these fridges track your ingredients and notify you if you’re running low on something,” says Gael McDonald, co-founder of Lifestyle Kitchens & Bathrooms, “they can even create shopping lists and calibrate what food is available to suggest recipes based upon that!”
Next year will see the 100th year anniversary of the modern kitchen – a creation attributed to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky who designed the Frankfurt Kitchen based upon the principals of Taylorism – an industrial management system focused on optimising efficiency and productivity. (There is an argument to be had that Benita Koch-Otte developed the first fitted kitchen three years earlier, in 1923, for Bahaus’s model home, Haus am Horn, though this only ever reached concept stage.)
“I never ran a household, never cooked, and never had any cooking experience,” Schütte-Lihotzky would later write in her memoir, Why I Became an Architect (she also became a Nazi resistance activist, was arrested by the Gestapo, and narrowly escaped execution). Her kitchen was instead built using information gleaned from interviews with housewives and time-motion studies and was heavily influenced by kitchen galleys on trains. The resulting layout enabled being able to turn from the sink to the gas stove without taking a step, and every utensil and ingredient being designated its own space. There was a revolving stool, foldaway ironing board, adjustable ceiling light, and a removable garbage drawer. Spouts were designed for easy pouring, and materials were picked for their practicality – oak flour containers repelled mealworms, while beech cutting surfaces resisted stains.
Within a few years, the Frankfurt Kitchen was installed in thousands of apartment buildings around its namesake city…
Following the second world war, Schütte-Lihotzky continued to design and build all around the world, but never quite managed to escape that narrow, functional shadow of her Frankfurt Kitchen. “If I would have known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else,” she exclaimed at the grand old age of 101, “I would never have built the damned kitchen!”
It was, of course, a shadow cast for good reason – and one befitting her activist credentials. For not only did she revolutionise the home in a very practical sense, but she also helped bring about social change too.
Within a few years, the Frankfurt Kitchen – which now has a place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art – was installed in thousands of apartment buildings around its namesake city, and soon became the standard for Western kitchen design, reframing women’s relationship with their homes.
“Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was passionately concerned about the quality of women’s lives,” former MoMA curator Juliet Kinchin tells NPR. “She felt without sorting the drudgery they were involved in, they’d never have time to develop themselves in a professional way.”
The modernism of the 1950s gave way to more open designs, and introduced new materials like Formica, chrome and linoleum. It was to be the decade that kitchens began to be considered as spaces of aesthetic satisfaction as well as function. For a decade from 1957, the Monsanto House at Disneyland in California showcased domestic living of the future, with, presciently, the kitchen occupying the centre spot, the heart of the home, replete with plastic chairs and tables. And at its centre was the microwave oven that was every bit as compact and practical as you’d find today.
Gadgets became more commonplace throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, as did the sight of men at the stove who no longer considered their cooking duties to end at the barbecue or Sunday roast. Television (male) chefs helped reframe the perception of the kitchen too. By the 1990s, the glamour kitchen had become the ultimate status symbol – for both men and women and the gadgets and accessories ever more glamorous – think wine fridges, marble islands, and commercial ovens. Now, smart ovens can be tuned on and programmed remotely, while speed ovens cook quicker than a microwave. There are wi-fi enabled fridges; voice-controlled, customisable coffee makers; load-sensing dishwashers that tailor water and energy usage; and smart scales that connect to nutrition apps.
“A lot of people like to have a screen so that they can do a cooking tutorial in their kitchen, or have easy access to recipes,” says Gael. “And then you get faucets that have motion sensors and are hands-free.” But smart doesn’t have to necessarily mean high tech, there are still ingenious interpretation of traditional kitchen elements.
“People are still attracted to clever storage solutions,” adds Gael. “Things like the Mondo cupboard that rotates to prevent you having to get on your hands and knees to reach the back of the cupboard, or steps that pop out from behind toe kicks to enable you to reach high shelves.”
We wonder what Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky would make of all that, and the wondrous designs that follow…
