That's basically a timeless look. I like it. Certainly nothing like the 1985 I experienced.

I sure don’t remember seeing anything like that in 1985.

And I still like it very much, except for the open shelving. Too much dust.

I remember the 80's as being the "golden oak" years . . .

I love kitchens with fireplaces . . . I sort of technically have one because my family room with a gas fireplace is open to the kitchen. But that darn fireplace has two speeds--too hot or off . . . it does a great job of taking the chill off the room but doesn't work well over the day to heat the room or provide ambience. It's so efficient we can heat our whole house with it when we have a power outage, we can start it with a manual igniter.

I seem to associate white kitchens with the aughts '

I was dating a guy who had a dismal kitchen at his house and I was trying to convince him to redo it with white cabinets. I sent him a bunch of "inspiration pictures." I think he had Aspbergers Syndrom or something, his house was a dump and he didn't seem to realize what a BAD impression it made on any potential partners . . . oh well, my current partner sealed the deal by helping me redo my former kitchen with a groovy tile backsplash . . . but I digress. I also recall right before the white cabinet craze telling a CF friend that I wish white kitchens were in style because I liked them. I was ahead of the curve then. I still like them.

I also am a fan of REAL WOOD painted kitchen cabinets, in actual colors. You heard it here first folks, I predict it becoming an eventual trend . . . My best friend bought a small house and painted her dark brown kitchen cabinets in a light yellow color, She rented a sprayer, took them down to paint them in the barn, and bought the special cabinet paint. They ended up looking marvelous and for a fraction of the cost of getting all new. That's one reason I like the real wood cabinets, you can paint and repaint them to give yourself a new style pretty easily. This whole "tear it all out and install new" is so unnecessary and wasteful. That grainy oak doesn't lend itself to painting but I guess if it's real it can be refinished . . . a lot of it is laminate though . . .

I grew up in a Georgian style home with a big kitchen with big beautiful real wood cabinets that a real carpenter made for my mother when they first moved into the house. They started out a gold color and then went to cream and light yellow for various refreshes. The Formica faux marble countertops looked as good as new after 40 years!! The nasty old vinyl flooring did not hold up as well . . . I remember my mother scrubbing it on her hands and knees, this was before they invented the finishes that look endlessly waxed . . .

Is this in the US?

I like it a lot but it's not what my 80s kitchen looked like. Whoever designed that had an eye towards timeless looks and skipped the trends.

Open shelving is still a bad choice for earthquake country.

Can you tell what material the white counter is? I would think tile or formica?

"Cheapo" appliances, the skylight and quarry tile floor date it to the 80s. Looks like tile perimeters.

But open shelving, cutting boards as decor, and a rosemary plant? So 2020's. Hard to believe.

I saw it on this Tumblr account a few months ago:

https://vintagehomecollection.tumblr.com/tagged/1980s/page/5

This account is amazing. The person who runs the page has collected so many cool pictures and has them categorized by decade.

If you go to the main page, you can click on each decade, or just scroll the feed for everything. Prepare to stay a while. :)

I think we had that oven, and dishwasher too. I KNOW we had a Mr. Coffee like that. My 1980 condo kitchen had butcher-block-look formica. I really like the look of butcher block, and those counters were pretty indestructible. They looked good with the, yes, oak cabinets, and the backsplash was wallpaper.

Things like cutting boards and baskets as decor were still going on in Texas,then, but fading. Here, I like the fireplace and decor, it seems a fresh take on the colonial look that had been going on.

My parents put topiary wallpaper in their kitchen, painted the slab cabinets white and put in white formica in their kitchen in 1984+-, so topiary was a thing back then. Of course there were no open shelves, and the floor was a white vinyl brick looking pattern IIRC. Way too twee and trendy for my taste, but she loved it (my dad was an excellent painter and wallpaperer, it was all DIY).

Gah, those stools look like they ordered them up from the current Ballard catalogue. Seriously, I was a kid in the eighties and don‘t remember ANYONE having an island with seating like that!

I don’t recall those little can lights, either. They were out there, but not in the ”everyday” builds.

The fireplace really throws me off. I cannot imagine anyone wanting a fireplace in a kitchen or close to it

That said, I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now, although that style bothered me less then than it does now. I started design school in 1985, and I remember styles like this being promoted.

Nini, we had those kitchen chairs, not counter height, in apple red lacquer in the 80s. My mother bought the chairs in the UK, though they may have been from somepleace else in Europe.

Open shelving has been common in 'summer cabins'; rentals that way it's easy to find what you need and quick to inventory when cleaning. For a short minute the look creeped into everyday use homes but didn't last for all the reasons sited above.

There were actually kitchens like this in the seventies too: one of my friend's parents had one, all white laminate, quarry tile, butcher block, mostly upper cabinets but some shelves, hanging plants. All very Jasper Conran- Habitat. And this was in the middle of nowhere although they were transplants to town.

I have lots of real estate pictures of kitchens like this from the 70s and 80s although mostly from contemporary houses which were not the average build either. Most people remember specific types of very cliche mass market design from any period because that's what was promoted and that's what people did (and still do) because most people don't want to look too different than anyone else.

Yeah, bar-height islands or tables were around even in the 60s. Not everyone was into that style or had to have it like they do now. I just remember loving being able to sit on the higher bar stools which usually swiveled, when I was a kid. People often had at least one counter height chair around the kitchen.

My aunt and uncle had a bar island in their downstairs "Tiki" room complete with bamboo card table and chairs and grasscloth something or other. They had a mini kitchen in there with a bar and barstools. This was in the 60s. I think a few of the modern style homes had this in the kitchen, but it was very common in "rec rooms." (recreation). I just know they were around in the 60s because I was a little kid and thought they were cool so would always gravitate to them if we were visiting a house that had them. Had to be chastised not to play around on them or I could fall and break either myself or the chairs or both.

Considering Tudor development of the fireplace was a step in the development of cooking indoors and kitchens proper, they seem to have a place in kitchens.

I'm sure a lot of my desire for a kitchen fireplace is I am a cold damp climate resident. I've seen them often in old New England homes . . . even in dining rooms too.

I think they are particularly common in DR; every house I've owned had a fpl in the DR.

At one point I was sure there was a closed off fpl in the little bumpout my first kitchen (the house had 7 fpl, one of which directly above the K). Alas, it was not.

Speaking of fireplaces in a kitchen - I so want this kitchen!

It seems to me that a kitchen large enough to have an island with seating was kind of an aspirational thing in the 80's. Along with mediterranean style!

I would be happy w/this kitchen today - it's the kitchen from The Exorcist(1973)

I covet that Garland stove w/flattop

Oh yes, all my dreams, a cosy/cozy sitting area off the kitchen, upholstered seating (even though I am an inveterate spiller!) big china cabinet, fireplace, white kitchen, lots of counter space, little serving nook sort of in-house butler's pantry, And oddly, the biology lab teacher in me loves the black countertops and sink . . .

The only thing that would not be good for me would be the stone floor, The floor in my dream kitchen is linoleum, real linoleum. I am not only a spiller but an inveterate dropper!

Fun ’60’s kitchen:

More where that came from.

@Jilly - My grandmother had that range!

Why did they go away? I’d like having the oven waist high! (I think?)

Probably because they were not modular.

I think the dropped cooktop makes sense because it puts the pots themselves more at working height, especially bigger pots. Also the more linear arrangment of burners. I think one version of this was purely linear in terms of burner arrangement. Even on standard ranges the actual top used to be slightly recessed, even if only about 2". The current situation with the grates (especially on gas) being a couple inches higher than the countertop is more recent.

Saw that vintage 60s oven/stove set up on an old rerun of "Bewitched."

<...most people don't want to look too different than anyone else.>

This is what they tried to teach me in the marketing class that I had to take for my design degree, but I never understood it. The professor also told me that I was part of the 3% fringe that was different from most people. I wish he had told me that before the first test because I answered all the questions with the assumption that most people shopped the way I do and got most of the answer wrong.

That's when I had a talk with the professor and told him that I had already had a career as a fashion designer. He told him that this class was not meant for someone like me, but I still had to take it for my Interior Design degree. Afterwards, I answered the questions the exact opposite of what I thought was right and starting making A's.

In the 1980s when I was in design school, I only bought Italian design magazines (which I still have to this day), and I even took Italian classes so that I would be able to read the magazines. A lot of the styles that I saw in the Italian magazines from the late 1980s look contemporary today, but I think Italian design has always been way ahead of American design, in general.

Well there's some notion that doing something too different than the current trend is going to be bizarre or ugly by default. But sometimes it's actually the trend that is bizarre or ugly, really, and avoiding it is really the way to create something that has some longevity.

I wonder if the lower stovetops went away for safety issues. Seems like it would be easy to catch yourself on fire reaching into the oven, or having the burners lower could be a danger to children. One of my friends bought a house in Corvallis OR with that range about 20 years ago. It killed me when she replaced it.

Unlike alot of this crowd, I associate personal memories and tv kitchens from the late 70s through the early 90s as mostly white. Family and friends had white cabs, a few had the dreaded white melanine with oak trim, but most were full white. Many sitcom kitchens of those years were white with open shelves too. Benson and Growing Pains come to mind. And Mad about you must have been very early 90s right.

I just skimmed the replies, but where is this house located? Maybe it's not designed for a 1980's kitchen, instead it's designed to look like an old French or English Country manor house? The owner is well-traveled. Yeah, that's it. :)