If you could time-travel to the kitchen of 2010, chances are you would feel right at home. Although you may wonder if you landed in the right room.
If kitchen designers’ predictions are correct, the kitchen of the next decade will be more of a living room than ever and may even subsume it. One will see more comfortable seating, lots of sofas, lavish entertainment centers, furniture-like cabinetry, high-quality fabrics and furnishings, with some elements like islands assuming the beauty of art objects. Just as one would expect in a room where one spends a lot of time.
Convenience will be of maximum concern and designers will work hard to provide it. For both beauty and maintenance’s sake, a greater mixture of gorgeous surface materials in varying patterns and colors will be used. There will be colors-no all-white kitchens on the horizon-although they will be soft, tranquil ones.
These ideas and more were dramatically expressed in a model environment created by Cameron M. Snyder of Kitchen Concepts in Norwell, Mass., for the Design Idea Center of the Kitchen/Bath Industry Show held in Chicago earlier this month. The Design Idea Center is an area of the show focusing on innovative design ideas, offering solutions to problems and showcasing new products.
“The overall theme was looking to the future and how families would be living in the decade to come,” said Snyder, who in collaboration with Wood-Mode Inc. and, with Woman’s Day Special Interest Publications as sponsor, developed his thought-provoking design for “All-In-One Living.”
Close at hearth
Most years’ models concentrate solely on kitchens and baths; Snyder’s project was a total living environment. The faux home in the center of the kitchen and bath show included a super-functional kitchen, a dining area nestled in a glassed-in sun room, a media center, luxurious sleeping and grooming areas and a spalike bath with whirlpool, sauna and steam room.
All the areas were interconnected, radiating from a central circular tile fire pit enclosed in sandblasted glass. Snyder wanted the fire pit visible from every area, evoking the time when the hearth was the center of the home and people gathered close to it.
While having the kitchen open to other areas of the house was important to the designer, sliding pocket doors close off the kitchen when privacy is wanted.His vision was “based on the idea of home as a comfortable oasis, a place where people can retreat at the end of the day with every amenity available,” Snyder said.
His design is highly adaptable for anything from an urban kitchen to a luxury guest cottage or cabin hideaway in the wilderness. Wherever it would be placed, the outdoors is meant to be brought in with skylights, windows and French doors.
While there was much to see, the kitchen drew our focus. Sleek and gleaming, its use of a lot of soft, curving lines draws one in and entices one to stay.
The reason Snyder chose to give his kitchen more of a contemporary than a period look, he says, is “we are starting to see a resurgence of contemporary, though not as high-tech as in the 1980s.”
Colors are kept soft for tranquility, as in the soft tan or stone-colored floors, while Snyder uses a deep blue for the Lazy Susan in the island for impact.
Multiplicity
As Snyder considers glass a futuristic material, he uses a great deal of it–in the snack bar, the bar stools, the glass enclosure of the fire pit and a glass-topped table in a sun room in back of the island–to bring in a feeling of light.
The spectacular bilevel, multisurfaced, multipurpose island, almost like an abstract, wing-shaped sculpture centered in an open area, is meant to be the place for folks to congregate.
“Kitchens are not laboratories, but places where people socialize,” says Snyder. “When you have other people over, the cook–or cooks–have to be part of what is going on. Most kitchens of the future will be fairly open.”
Snyder saw double when it came to many appliances such as dishwashers, microwaves and waste-disposal units, for the sake of multiple cooks living in the same house, a trend due to Baby Boomers retiring and staying home more. There are no “smart appliances” in his kitchen–the bar-code reading refrigerators and microwave ovens linked to the Internet to keep track of food, recipes and cooking instructions, which manufacturers are working on.
“We did not integrate that, as it is just not here yet,” said Snyder, though he believes the kitchen of 2010 will probably have them. “In the next five years, we’ll begin to see a lot of that.”
Asked if thinks time-pressed Americans are heading toward extreme minimalism in the kitchen, he says with a huge smile, “I don’t think anything we do in this society is minimalistic.”
– Convenience is a major influence in design of the kitchen of 2010. The overall horseshoe or semicircular design puts everything within easy reach for the cook-or cooks-in the family. One area relates visually to the adjacent, and lots of soft, curving lines add up to a total impression of harmony and intimacy.
– Nature, the outdoors, is brought in through skylights, French doors and windows (not seen here, but beyond the island is a semi-circular all-glass-walled sun room). Designers see a trend toward extending home entertaining to an adjoining deck or other outdoor space.
– Using more than one color cabinetry continues to be a trend.
– Designers are seeing double, another trend. Two Frigidaire dishwashers and two In-Sink-Erator waste disposers enable more than one cook in the family to work and clean up without interference.
– Colors are soft and pretty to go with the new living room that is tomorrow’s kitchen. Butter yellow appears to be the new neutral. Colors in this kitchen vary from butter yellow cabinets to citrus green glass and the deep sea blue island top for impact.
– ABBAKA’s Luna hood in polished brass gleaming above the Frigidaire glass cooktop incorporates use of still another kind of surface material.
– Large, multilevel, multipurpose islands are the trend. This wing or fan-shaped island by Wood-Mode Inc. is topped with Wilsonart solid surfacing combined with a snack bar of aqua-colored sand-blasted glass. This island is a perfect example of how kitchen designers are taking advantage of the beautiful surfaces with varying textures, colors and patterns available today to create beauty in the kitchen.
– Maximum storage capacity is a priority. Built-ins keep things close at hand and out of sight. Here, Frigidaire’s stacked washer and drier are behind furniture-like cabinet doors. Lines in cabinetry are simpler, but warmer woods are used.
– Sand-blasted glass stools by Zeritalia, near art objects in themselves, are used as seating at the snack bar. Glass is seen as a futuristic material. Expect more to be used in years ahead.
– The island, with a bold blue Lazy Susan, has shelving for small appliances, a second sink, a microwave and a Frigidaire Warm and Serve drawer. Expect to see more “deconstructed” appliances, such as a single-drawer dishwasher and refrigerated drawers, in the future.
– The media center has an RCA DVD player and a giant RCA television built into Wood-Mode cabinetry.
– The media center has an RCA DVD player and a giant RCA television built into Wood-Mode cabinetry.
– Floors are soft and light-colored. The designer juxtaposed hardwood, laminate and tile flooring in the floors, defining individual spaces with each material.
