Kitchen Design

[parkview094]

What a superb job. I hope my kitchen turns out as lovely as yours - so would you change anything?

The heating. The expensive of electric underfloor heating plus the extra raised floor height put us off, but with hindsight we should probably have gone for it. I never knew a wooden floor could be 'cold'.

I need to sort out a solution for the draughty back door. I think some improved draught excluders may be all that's needed there. The large single-glazed window is also cold - so I've ordered a motorised blind as a first step. If that doesn't improve things, I'm going to try magnetic secondary glazing.

The kitchen units are painted pine. If the budget would have allowed, a hardwood would have been better. The dark paint chips/dents very easily - the white much less.

I was a cynic regarding drawers (instead of cupboards) initially, but drawers are great. I've bought a whole load of wire pull-out baskets and fitted them to the inside of most of the cupboards. These are definitely cheaper as a retro-fit than buying specialised cupboard innards.

I fitted kick-board level LED lighting as an afterthought, activated by a PIR. I wish I had planned for this before we started, so we could have a less heath-robinson setup. I put it in as I was curious to see what it would look like, but the reality is great. It provides just enough light to find the sink to make a cup of tea, or to grab something from the fridge at night.

Think that's it, but it's probably only week 2 of actually using it as a kitchen..

 

[Pennyviz]

Thank you, has inspired me!

 

[CliffordPope]

This is a Period Property forum, isn't it?
I don't see many period kitchens here, more like Grand Designs.

 

[kreyszig]

I thought it was pretty much a given that Kitchens and Bathrooms are two rooms you don't want to take back to period..

 

[Flyfisher]

That's a very good point. Truly period kitchens and bathrooms would have been very rudimentary indeed and not acceptable to most people these days. I remember my grandparent's house (terraced 2 up, 2 down) with a 'scullery' instead of what we'd call a kitchen these days with an 'Ascot' heater for hot water, an outside toilet (and chamber pots in the two bedrooms) and a tin bath for bath nights. No central heating of course, just a couple of open fires though I recall that the rarely used 'front room' had a two-bar electric heater in the hearth. This was early 1960s north London (though the house probably dated from Victorian times) and the whole area, has long since been demolished to make way for 'modern' homes (and you can probably guess how well they've aged, like many 1960/70s buildings!).

I've no doubt there were also much grander houses with somewhat better facilities, but I'm not sure when hot running water, for example, was first or even widely available. Our house (c.1550) only gained mains water in the 1930s and I understand that indoor toilets only became commonplace after mains water was connected. Plus, of course, kitchens would have often been the domain of the household staff only, so would not have been a design priority for the home owners and they certainly wouldn't have spent very much of their time in kitchens as seems commonplace these days.

I suspect the 'period' kitchens and bathrooms beloved of the glossy magazines with their Agas, butler sinks and large bathtubs are primarily modern and fashionable inventions and even if they really existed in the past they would have occupied a relatively short period of history, perhaps late Victorian to early Edwardian eras. Nothing wrong with the prevailing fashion for 'rose-tinted' nostalgia of course, but we shouldn't be fooled into believing it's the same thing as period accuracy. My bet is that there's no one on PPUK (or indeed anywhere else) who is living in a truly authentic period property because such housing conditions would simply not be acceptable to anyone these days.

 

[Abi Cott]

I'm not a big fan of 'period kitchens' they always strike me as rather fake. Unless you go for mismatched freestanding units and a large kitchen table they are just not 'period'. I'd rather see a hyper-modern kitchen in a period space giving a strong contrast between the old and new and accentuating both.

 

[plasticpigeon]

How is this for a period kitchen. It's in a house that was for sale not far from me last year. When we moved into our house, all the old lead pipes were till left in the kitchen, even though they weren't connected. It was obvious that there was once a wall mounted sink by the back door with hot and cold taps straight out of the pipes. How on earth did they wash up 100 years ago without counter tops. Was it just a scrub top table that got used for everything? Our kitchen has a quarry floor, scrub top table, range size cooker where a range would have been and cod period cupboards. I think it could approach the period feel if I was allowed to change the colours, so rather than the polite pinterest green, I could use dark brown on the cupboards and window frames, and perhaps have a painted dado, but I know which battles to pick and that isn't one of them!

 

[Flyfisher]

How is this for a period kitchen. . . .

What 'period' has electric lighting, cooker and fridge? :wink:

Here's some interesting reading about 17th century living - 'Hearth Tax' anyone? :shock: :lol: : http://www.kjarrett.com/livinginthepast/category/housing/17th-century-housing/

 

[88v8]

There's a happy medium somewhere.
My heart does sink when I see a Period house with a modern bathroom and no effort to use the many repro fittings that are available, and a modern kitchen with laminates that might as well be the kitchen of any new house. Yes, aping an upper-class Edwardian kitchen might not be historically accurate, but it looks jolly nice, can work perfectly well and does not offend the eye.

Wooden floors cold?? You should try stone. Ask the Xmas fairy for some Period carpet slippers.

Ivor

 

[plasticpigeon]

How is this for a period kitchen. . . .

What 'period' has electric lighting, cooker and fridge? :wink:

Are you an engineer?

 

[Flyfisher]

Why is that relevant?

Perhaps we should discuss what 'period' actually means in the context of houses? I suspect it means different things to different people, which makes it a rather vague subject for discussion and ripe for misunderstandings. What I don't believe it means is any form of complete historical accuracy, because no one would wish to live in identical conditions to those prevailing 100 years ago or more - probably not even 50 years ago.

There's a happy medium somewhere.
My heart does sink when I see a Period house with a modern bathroom and no effort to use the many repro fittings that are available, and a modern kitchen with laminates that might as well be the kitchen of any new house. Yes, aping an upper-class Edwardian kitchen might not be historically accurate, but it looks jolly nice, can work perfectly well and does not offend the eye.

Yes, but a happy medium is wholly subjective and different eyes are offended by different things. It's a matter of personal preference and fashion, so there cannot be anything right or wrong, except when striving for true historical accuracy - which nobody actually wants, or is prepared to endure, as far as I can deduce. 'Period living' today seems to be all about living in an old house that has been upgraded with all 'mod cons' to make our working weekdays easy, comfortable and convenient but allows for 'roughing it' a bit by lighting an open fire and a few candles after a muddy winter's walk to the pub and back at the weekend.

Not a criticism, just an observation.

 

[Kearn]

How is this for a period kitchen. . . .

What 'period' has electric lighting, cooker and fridge? :wink:

Here's some interesting reading about 17th century living - 'Hearth Tax' anyone? :shock: :lol: : http://www.kjarrett.com/livinginthepast/category/housing/17th-century-housing/

I don't know, that oven has certainly seen some decades!!! :lol:

 

[MikeG]

.....

Beautiful room, love the floor.......


........but what's the tape on the table covering the junction between the main boards and the bread-board ends?

 

[kreyszig]

duh.. that's obviously to keep crumbs out of the gap between the boards ;-)

 

[Socksitis]

This is a Period Property forum, isn't it?
I don't see many period kitchens here, more like Grand Designs.

I thought about the style of our kitchen and as the house is possibly 600 years old, I could not decide what would be the right period to go back to. So my thoughts were to continue telling the story - so I am opting for the period of today. Bang up to date.

 

[Flyfisher]

A perfectly reasonable approach, I'd say. Our house is c.1550 (so far more modern than Socksitis' :wink: ) and, as I've mentioned before, it only exists in its present state because of all the various additions and alterations over the centuries, so we had to make a similar choice. The oldest part is 16th century close-studded oak timber frame, it has a 17th century flint/rubble wall addition sized specifically to accommodate reclaimed ceiling beams, plus an 18th century chalk block addition. A 20th century flat-roofed toilet/washroom addition and an external 'boiler house' (believed to be 1930s) were both lost in the early 1980s through a combination of poor build and complete neglect. In addition, a few hundred years ago the timber frame and original small windows were covered over with lath & render as part of a, presumably then fashionable, 'Georgian makeover' in which the oak frame was hacked apart in order to fit large sash windows and a 'new' front door. We believe this was probably done at the same time that a large 'Adam' style fireplace was installed in the drawing room, which entailed building a large external chimney stack up against the rear of the timber frame part of the house, thus obscuring the rear-facing original windows. At the same time, the original oak frame was internally covered up with 'new' lath and plaster on a sub-frame nailed to the original posts, thus 'sanitising' all trace of the original timber frame with nice flat, square walls - no doubt a forerunner of Barry Bucknell's 1960s modernising interior design ethos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RVnzu0COFU

So, what WOULD be the appropriate 'period' when choosing to . . . . well, anything really? Given the long history of changes to the house, it was decided that the most appropriate way to update the kitchen was to build a completely new one! I say 'it was decided' because our original idea was to relocate the kitchen into a larger room and work from there (and for which we were granted LBC), but as our plans progressed this raised more and more issues in terms of layout design and involved more and more compromises, not to mention the loss of one of the main formal rooms of the original house. We turned to our CO for help and it was he who suggested an extension to house the new kitchen (and services, as there were none at that end of the house) - something we would never have thought of but which immediately made complete sense, eliminated a myriad of poor compromises, left the original building almost untouched and simply continued the history of alterations and additions to the house as lifestyles and requirements had changed over the centuries. Even English Heritage (the house is G2* so they are involved in all LBC applications) acknowledged that unless period properties are made suitable for modern lifestyles then no one will want to live in them and they will then be lost through neglect and decay - something that the house had already suffered from quite badly in the few decades before we took it on.

I fully appreciate that such an approach would not be everyone's choice (as we've discussed previously) but I would defend it as just as valid as any other choices, which is my basic point about such things being purely subjective rather than inherently right or wrong. Fashions and lifestyles change and people's ideas about 'style' and decor change with them - as Barry Bucknell has proved! :lol:

 

[plasticpigeon]

Perhaps you could have knocked it down and started again with a zero carbon, modular build Passivhaus. Take anything to an extreme and it sounds ridiculous. I have a TV in my front room, but that doesn't mean I should remove the fireplace. In my example, there is what I believe to be a real kitchen from some time past, which may be newer than the house, with the minimum of intervention to make it function in a way that the occupants find acceptable. It isn't fake, but so what if it was? Yes it has a fridge, of course it does. That doesn't mean it also needs sparkly tiles, led strip lights and plastic double glazing. I would argue that if people like period houses for the history, or the style, or the craftsmanship, or materials used, or because they don't like to see good stuff junked, then why does that not apply to kitchens, bathrooms or even extensions or new builds (of course not all the above apply with extensions or new builds). Of course people need to be free to do what they want unless the building is listed, but to actually try to make arguments that a period style is inappropriate is totally at odds with why people are attracted to period properties in the first place. Like anything else, it just needs to be done well if that is the style chosen. I believe a historic style is as valid as any other style in a period property.

 

[Flyfisher]

I believe a historic style is as valid as any other style in a period property.

Fair enough, but what does that actually mean in practice? I'm just questioning what people actually mean by 'historic style' when what they really seem to mean (at least what the end result suggests) is cherry-picking lots of different things as they see fit based on their personal choices, which leads to a mish-mash of 'periods' - old and new. I'd bet most of our period properties have fridges, freezers, food mixers, washing machines, tumble dryers, dishwashers, electric kettles, toasters, microwave ovens, etc - few of which were commonplace as little as 50 years ago. Perhaps 'historic style' just means hiding such modern essentials behind some antique furniture, Victorian (style) taps and 'Georgian' style light switches and power sockets? All of which is perfectly fine and valid in terms of personal choices, but is somewhat disingenuous to say it's truly historic.

 

[Kearn]

This is a Period Property forum, isn't it?
I don't see many period kitchens here, more like Grand Designs.

Presuming this comment was intended to get a rise, I'll not bite.

However, many folks on here are lucky enough to look after early properties, which is 400+ years plus in my mind. As we all know, wiring and pipe work is damn near impossible at times in a timber framed or stone built home. Getting modern bathrooms in is essential, unless we wish to emulate the life of our ancestors?! but almost always involves compromises.

I for one wouldn't want to resort to cooking everything around our living room inglenook for originalities sake and I'm sure many other owners done fancy relocating to their Georgian/Victorian basements. I am actually quite happy that a relatively inoffensive 1980s single storey addition was built at the rear of our 16C framed cottage as it enables us to leave the original building alone for the future and enjoy a fully functioning kitchen, as a contrast to the old. Trying to squeeze a square shaped kitchen into a round shaped old room is rarely effective.

Without understanding your definition of 'period' then really, any period is as valid as the next, including that of today if decisions are made conscious of the original building fabric. What I think looks far worse is some hideous faux representation of an older period - this clashes far more with original features than modern if considered.

 

[plasticpigeon]

I believe a historic style is as valid as any other style in a period property.

Fair enough, but what does that actually mean in practice? I'm just questioning what people actually mean by 'historic style' when what they really seem to mean (at least what the end result suggests) is cherry-picking lots of different things as they see fit based on their personal choices, which leads to a mish-mash of 'periods' - old and new. I'd bet most of our period properties have fridges, freezers, food mixers, washing machines, tumble dryers, dishwashers, electric kettles, toasters, microwave ovens, etc - few of which were commonplace as little as 50 years ago. Perhaps 'historic style' just means hiding such modern essentials behind some antique furniture, Victorian (style) taps and 'Georgian' style light switches and power sockets? All of which is perfectly fine and valid in terms of personal choices, but is somewhat disingenuous to say it's truly historic.

One of the guys at work thinks that because I have wooden windows that I inconveniently need to paint, that I do not want to live in the 21st century, so therefore I should try and locate some smallpox so I can infect my son for that true period lifestyle. He is obviously "trolling". Luckily some people can get a handle on compromise. A lot of people have fitted carpets, use synthetic paints, wear jeans drive a car, have daily showers and brush their teeth, etc etc. So what! That doesn't render everything from the past redundant. In a period property, I think the most important thing is to make sure as little of the original fabiric is altered as possible, so try and keep the original floor, range, sink maybe if it is there, embrace the style of the place that attracted you to buy it. Beyond that it is personal preference, but if one needs extra cupboards, why not have them made with panel doors and beaded edging to the carcasses for example (something I wish I had done) and use period sensitive colours, or have a scrub top table, even if it isn't used for preparing food. Kettles, microwaves and toasters certainly don't dictate the style of my kitchen, do they yours? Incongruous in a museum, but not in a home.