The better slide show was the one for the 'real chef's kitchens' Pelaccio has the best one. Garces' farm probably has the MOST expensive daikon radish ever grown :)

Here is a link that might be useful: Chef's kitchens

I like the Chef's kitchen 1Mx more than the Kitchen that Ate the House.

(A "1Mx more" is the nice way of saying I don't like it at all)

This post was edited by allison0704 on Wed, Jan 23, 13 at 10:13

I liked some of the kitchens in the kitchen that ate the house slideshow. Don't know how well they function, or not, but I enjoyed looking at them. :)

The refrigerator in the wok kitchen had fingerprints all over the refrigerator :(

the kitchen that ate the house...perfect celebrity/sports hero playpen.
ugly.

OK, well maybe I don't love all of the kitchens in the slide show (not the first) but I do love Whitney Fitzgerald's kitchen (slides 3,4,& 5), and some of the later ones, too.

Love Pelaccio's kitchen, too. I have to admire his passion for cooking and how it extends to growing his own food. At this point in my life, though, I feel something like overwhelming inadequacy when I look at him/his garden/his kitchen. :/

The kitchen in my new house will be enlarged from 70 square feet to 84. There are bigger islands. I think the multiple room kitchen is kind of interesting as a concept because it is both common in commercial settings and where I grew up in a slightly different form.

Where I grew up, some houses had separate scullery type rooms and a lot of people had an extra range either in the utility room, the basement or part of the garage that was used for canning and overload baking at certain times of year.

Did you notice how many of the model kitchens had lower cabs instead of drawers? Hasn't the drawer trend reached the consciousness of high-end homebuilders?

I also noticed that in many cases, the actually working area was not that huge. Thank goodness - you'd get exhausted if you actually tried to cook in a kitchen than was too spread out. I liked the Fitzgerald one, too. The working area was really just a galley, very efficient.

Wow, what an interesting thread. The juxtaposition of the Eat the Whole House kitchens and the chefs' kitchens is stunning!

You can spend a load of money building a fabulous kitchen to draw your family and friends to this "heart of the home".

Or, maybe people could spend half that amount and go to cooking school. Then your fabulous FOOD will draw your family and friends to your heart of the home kitchen.

In my experience, people are drawn to a fun, warm cook who feeds them food that inspires and delights all their senses, more than a big fancy kitchen.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE fancy kitchens, but only if they produce beautiful food. A kitchen that is beautiful to look at but doesn't produce great food (and have a warm hearted cook!) is like spying a luscious full bloom rose in the garden, but when you lean in to inhale it's heady perfume, there is none....it's SO disappointing!

So when does a kitchen become not-a-kitchen? 1400 sf?? Two flat screen TVs? What's in the name "kitchen"? I propose that if you don't or can't cook in the kitchen, it's not a kitchen. That's not to say it's not fun to be in, look at, pay $58,000,000 for or plan ... but it's not a "kitchen". In my books.

Course paying someone else to farm your land also doesn't make you a "farmer". Produce-lover perhaps, fantabulous employer? But if you don't farm, you're not a farmer...

(when did I get so cranky?)

I really like the Ripert/Poggenpohl kitchen on slide 6. I like the materials and the sleek lines, and the size does not seem excessive to me.

I can't imagine having a kitchen large enough to house 2 TVs! How do you have 2 TVs running in the same open space w/o going nuts?

aliris-I completely agree. There have been threads on here before talking about opening everything up or keeping the kitchen separate (from a *big room* concept), but I can't remember any KITCHENS I've seen on GW that have taken the open concept to such extremes.

What they were calling a kitchen in the article, I would have called a great room. The square footage I would have actually attributed to the kitchen was much smaller. I think there was a bit of hyperbole going on.

Slightly OT, but speaking of farmers, a great read is Kristin Kimball's ''The Dirty Life''.

Here is a link that might be useful: A real farmer

We bought a house 11 yrs. ago w/ an open floor plan. What I've discovered is that I like it best when I'm alone, or just w/ DH.

We're empty nesters and I don't think I would have liked raising my family in this style house. Perfect, when the kids were babies, preschool, & early elementary. But not so through the middle school, HS & college yrs.when we wanted them to feel their friends were welcome. Any mess or clutter seems to loom large in an open space, and that would have bothered me. I imagine many have finished family rooms in the basement, etc. but this home does not.

I'm sitting at my kitchen island - alone - right now with things roasting and simmering for tonight's dinner. I could watch the TV in the adjacent sunroom while I prepped vegetables. I get to enjoy the blazing fireplace in the LR and see the sunny wintry landscape through the big windows. Except when I cleaned it, I rarely spent any time alone to appreciate the LR in our old home. In short, I get to enjoy many more aspects of my home than I would in a closed kitchen. In my old home (of 20 yrs.) I was closed into one smallish working kitchen with one window over the sink.

When I entertain, I would love to have that hidden away workspace when I'm doing serious cooking. I don't like cooking and baking with an audience that isn't my immediate family.

These open kitchens have pros & cons. It will be interesting to see if they remain in fashion.

I know to whom that first kitchen with the two TVs belongs/belonged in Bel Air. You cant really say the kitchen is too big for the house though as the house is something in excess of 45,000 square feet. And that's just the public kitchen. It has a full commercial kitchen also. The owner doesn't cook, but entertains very lavishly with large groups often. It even has a name. La Belvedere.

Is that actually Ripert's kitchen or did he just help with the design? i couldn't tell from the description.

i liked the Deguilo kitchen also. What is that backsplash?? I really like it...

This post was edited by breezygirl on Wed, Jan 23, 13 at 19:03