unfitted kitchen idea 2023
Put your hands up if you have heard of an unfitted kitchen. (ding) What about a free-standing kitchen? (ding) A restaurant-style kitchen? Have you ever noticed that these kind of kitchens don't actually have all that much attached to the walls? Not having anything fixed down seems kind of ridiculous. Well, it's not. Today I want to talk to you about one of my favorite things in the entire world, which is the unfitted kitchen.
The first question we have to ask ourselves is, what is an unfitted kitchen?
Pretty much what it says on the can. It is a kitchen that is not fitted. By fitted, we mean having things that are built in, things that are custom, things that are attached to the wall, things that you can't pull out to clean behind. An unfitted kitchen, instead of being fitted with pieces, it is furnished with pieces. That basically means that everything from the workspaces, the storage, the appliances, anything that's in the kitchen is just kind of sitting there in the same way that things are just sitting in your bedroom. So your worktables are freestanding, your storage pieces are freestanding, your appliances are freestanding. The only thing that might be kind of permanently in place would be the sink, and because nothing is fixed down, these kind of kitchens are very, very flexible.
They can be re-arranged pretty much in an afternoon, with some furniture sliders, and as a person who changes her mind on the daily about how I want my rooms to function and look and be laid out, this is ideal. I mentioned these kitchens are not particularly new, so where did they come from? (upbeat music) As best I can tell, nobody woke up one day and said, "This is how kitchens are going to be," and that design was unfitted. It seems to me that they are more an evolution of how kitchens were brought into living structures.
If we go way, way back and we imagine people from a long time ago, just cooking around a fire pit, and then maybe we built a little house, so we don't have to be out in the rain, and then maybe we decided it would be a good idea if there was a way for the fire pit to be in the house, and then that's like the primitive kitchen. Fast forward to maybe 1600 or 1700, houses have several different rooms in them. One of them just happens to be the room that's defined for the kitchen, so in the kitchen you have your fireplace, maybe your fire pit, maybe you have some pots and pans that go to the fire pit, but maybe they need some place to be stored, so you put them on shelves, and then maybe it would be really nice to have a table to work at while you're making things on your fire pit, so let's put a table in there, too. Let's fast-forward, though, because this is obviously not how kitchens look nowadays.
By the mid-1800s, cookstoves were starting to become more of a commonplace appliance in the home. With the exception of these wood stoves, though, kitchens look more or less the same. Maybe a few shelves on the walls, some freestanding tables for work, but otherwise, not much has changed since earlier kitchens. That is, until the Industrial Revolution hit, or should I say the second Industrial Revolution? I didn't know until I was researching this, there were actually two. I'm speaking about the second Industrial Revolution that happened toward the end of the 1800s, into the early 1900s. In the 1887 book, "An Ideal Kitchen," she gives a layout of what a proper kitchen should be equipped with. Again, you can still see that it's very unfitted. You have a sink, you have a stove, and then you have a bunch of different tables that all serve multiple purposes, but we start to see just a little bit of a change. Her pantry and her china cabinet are actually separate from the rest of the room. Granted, they're probably full of shelves and maybe a little bit of basic cabinetry, but it is still a dedicated built-in space as opposed to just a room with a shelf or something to store all the china. Side note, I get a lot of questions about how to make a period-sympathetic house from before 1900. I would say that this book is an excellent start. Best as I can tell, kitchens didn't change a whole lot from 1830, 40 to 1887. If you look at an 1887 and maybe simplify it a little bit, this could be a really great option for making a sympathetic kitchen for an early 1800s house. So that's what 1887 looks like. Let's jump forward to my favorite kitchen book in the entire universe, which is "The Efficient Kitchen" from 1914. By this point, the second Industrial Revolution had really started to hit. This means that labor and trade and dimensional lumber, all of that was much more readily available, and especially available to normal households. In this book, she makes the point that a smaller kitchen might be more efficiently laid out with custom-built cabinets. I think she was probably referring to freestanding custom-built cabinets, but it still brings up the idea of having custom cabinets to fit a space, being the most efficient. While researching this, I came across a really great article from StarCraft custom builders. They make the really great point that unfitted kitchens actually have an inward workflow.
That means that all of the food is prepared at various stations around the edges of the kitchen and then brought to a central table for final processing or sometimes for eating. In a fitted kitchen, the cooks starts in the middle of the kitchen and then goes outward toward the perimeter to perform all of the different kitchen duties. But here's the thing. Unfitted kitchens and inward-oriented kitchens are really great if you have a large space to work with, and having a large space allows you to rearrange over and over and over until you get a layout that works really well for you, but what if you don't have a big kitchen? If we are technically going for the best use of every single square inch of a room, custom fitting cabinets might be a little bit of a better option, because there will be no wasted space. This kitchen is almost 15 by 15. It's a very, very large room, and that's part of the reason we decided to go with an unfitted kitchen, because we simply have the space for it, and this is why I think, ultimately, unfitted kitchens fell out of favor, is because houses just got smaller. You're not going to be able to have the same flexibility and the same number of options in a kitchen that's 10 by 10 versus a kitchen that's 15 by 20. As we transition from having servants or being servants to actually a middle class family being able to afford a home of their own, those homes were just smaller, so for smaller kitchens, building everything in and making it completely fitted and fixed was actually a much better use of space, and the best option to get a ton of counter space. The thing that's really interesting, it seems like we had very large houses with a lot of servants and staff to go along with them, then the houses shrank, and now, the cost of building is so cheap that the houses have kind of started to get really large again, and you almost see the return of that inward-flowing kitchen with the modern-day kitchen island. If you've been around here for a little bit, you probably know that I hate islands. I don't like them at all, actually. Not necessarily because they're not practical, because everybody who loves their island loves their island. I have an entire video dedicated to why I don't like islands, because I think they are clutter-grabbers, and they just, they collect junk, but in terms of bringing back that inward-oriented kitchen, they're great. If you're trying to go for a kitchen that looks period-sympathetic to your older house, islands may function the same, but they're always gonna look like modern islands. (upbeat music) I personally think the sweet spot for kitchen design is somewhere between 1910 and 1920. This is where there was just enough fitted cabinetry, maybe along one wall or two walls, but that was it, just enough to make a good use of space, but then the rest of the room is left freestanding, so you can kind of have that flexibility. An unfitted kitchen is actually a really interesting way to not only look more correct to the age of your house, but also to give yourself options in the future. If we take this kitchen and we completely build in all the cabinets, if I get sick of it in 20 years, I have to tear out all the cabinets, put all new cabinets in, new countertops, do all of this, just to get the kitchen to feel different, but if I have an unfitted kitchen, all I have to do is maybe go to the antique fair and buy a few new pieces, and swap things around. I have talked about this before, but I love the flexibility of being able to change the kitchen on a whim. Especially as we are getting a little bit more into homesteading, and growing our own food and possibly doing things that will require a lot of batch processing, like canning, I love the option to have a giant table stored somewhere, maybe outside or maybe in a different room, and then, when canning season hits, I can bring that table in, I can have so much more space, so much more work room, but then take it away when canning season is over and bring back my small work table, which is right there.
No, the tongue and groove isn't done in the kitchen, but this little wall is done, and so I had to film it. And before you ask, no, it's not staying this color, because it's just not. We had to patch it with a bunch of other colors, and it actually looks like a hot mess, but I can at least have it documented, that it's pretty. If you want to see more of our real-time updates and see what we're doing on the daily around the farm and the house,
