Kitchens are typically open, connected and viewable from another aspect of a house. I understand that that’s a pro for ventilation however, if a kitchen fire were to start, wouldn’t it be better to have it be in a closed off room that you can just easily shut a door too? For example, if a kitchen was placed in an area that could be used as a bedroom, wouldn’t that be good for stopping the spread of a fire if one were to occur?
In: 16
Open-plan kitchens became a trend with the decline in people having servants. Kitchens are open-plan because the cook is probably the owner of the house and the host of the party, so they don’t want a door between them and their guests.
Where i live kitchens have their own designated “rooms”. We call an open kitchen “American-Style kitchen”.
It depends. In the past most kitchens were in their own room. Then new trends came and kitchens have their own place in kinda open-space living rooms.
I prefer the new trend, even tho it has downsides (smell, noise, …) . I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and I am in the same room with my family and kid.
Fire is not the deciding factor. You can’t stop a fire by simply closing a (normal) door.
Also, our lives have changed a lot. In the past most housewives spent many hours in the kitchen prepping dinner while their husbands were watching TV in the living room and kids were playing around. Fortunately times are changing and the new open space layouts allow for more interaction with the rest of the family.
It’s just the current style. My kitchen is very closed off from the rest of the house. My house was built in 1909 as were most on my street.
We bought a house 15 years ago and it has a designated kitchen. We use the kitchen a lot, this open thing is more for people who don’t cook. A closed kitchen helps keeping the smell inside instead of spreading it throughout the house. If you ever cook fish or similar you know what I mean
And if you don’t eat in the kitchen you don’t show your guests the mess you made and can clean up while they are in the living room. It seems that open kitchen are dominant in the us but not so much in Germany.
All the answers here are good. From a Building/Fire Code perspective: The codes are designed to give people warning and time to get out when a fire happens (and to ensure fire resistant construction is used to inhibit spread) not prevent fires from happening. If you are making your 3am snack and light the house on fire (the assumption is) you will call emergency services and get everyone up and out before the smoke and fumes incapacitate everyone. Smoke and fumes from burning materials are what kill most people in residential fires.
They are, in places where the houses are built with bricks and concrete.
Also, open plan does not do well in places where the food is cooked with more spices since the aroma gets spread. So, say in The Indian subcontinent, pretty much every home has a separate kitchen, which is much smaller than an American one and the dining area is lumped with the living room/drawing room.
Newer homes often have open plan kitchens which then go on to become headaches since you have to be very careful about prep and cooking while having company.
Throughout most of the last 1000 years, kitchens were separated from the general living space in almost all houses, and still are in many places.
To address the question, in my opinion it helps to look less at old houses (pre-1850) or new houses (post-1950) and more at houses from in between. Before 1850, kitchens were often built as a separate building entirely, while post-1950, the kitchen is more often open to the rest of the main rooms on the main floor of the house.
But between those years is a transition period that I find instructive. Prior to 1950 the kitchen was considered working space, a noisy, messy space for servants (when available) and to be kept out of the public eye. While the use of open fire for cooking had been a thing of the past for a couple generations in most of America and Europe by 1950, the kitchen was still being built as though smoke and ash were a factor. Building styles often adapt more slowly than the lives lived in the houses themselves.
Prior to EIGHTEEN fifty, the kitchen did present something of a fire hazard but more importantly, in those days most every kitchen was a place of blood and guts, loose feathers and alchemy. You’re maybe familiar with the phrase about “knowing how the sausage is made.” Well, in those days EVERYONE knew how sausage was made and they sure as hell wanted a little distance from it.
In between 1850 and 1950 you have a number of innovations that change everything about food preparation and make it possible and even desirable to put the kitchen into the public eye. Canned foods made spoilage much less of a concern and allowed large amounts of staple foods to be stored right in the room. Refrigeration made it possible to buy meats that were uncured and already processed, making the scullery obsolete. The modern combination of oven and cook top saved a great deal of space and energy, allowing the whole works to fit into a reasonably sized room in the house itself. Indoor plumbing made cleanup far easier. To prepare what we think of as a full dinner would take a minimum of twelve hours in 1850. By 1950, a reasonably competent home cook could turn out a dinner for company in an hour or two. It’s impossible to overstate how much that changed daily life. Lastly, the television made cooking a glamorous occupation and part of an evening’s entertainment.
So what one sees in houses built around the turn of the 20th century is a kitchen space built into the main home, but still treated as work space. There’s typically (if the original floor plan survives) both a door to the public space–typically right into the dining room–and a door to the outside or into other working spaces like the basement or a foyer where the ice box would’ve been. Larger houses will usually have a rear stairwell from the kitchen up to servant’s quarters and down to the basement. The finishes will often be of less expensive materials, in very sharp contrast to newer houses, where kitchen finishes are usually MORE expensive.
So there you go. Doesn’t really have anything to do with fire, since for most of history EVERY room had a fire. Has a lot more to do with sausage casing and Julia Child.
A kitchen with a single entrance is a horrible idea. You want the room that is easily the most likely to catch fire to have only one entrance? Absolutely fuck that. That’s the exact opposite of good design. For a kitchen, if the house is big, the more exits a kitchen has the merrier.
Latest Answers