By Caroline McGhie
It's the place where families come to feast, fight and party - and where home owners can add real value. We look at the rise and rise of the kitchen.
The kitchen is a pushy thing these days. What home owner doesn't put it at the heart of it all? Claudia Mahoney shoved everything aside to make hers. "We took the laundry room, moved it into the basement, went out into the garden and filled up the side return, which was just dead space before," she says. She now sits in an oasis of white, with cliffs of storage units, an island for the kitchen sink and a folding glass wall of glass to the garden. A huge sheet of raspberry pink glass stretches the full length of the room as a splashback.
Maisie, aged 18 months, has a matching egg-shaped high chair in raspberry ripple. The Emma Bridgewater cat bowls covered in pink hearts match Maisie's doll-sized Emma Bridgewater tea set and Claudia's cupboardful of Emma Bridgewater crockery. All is pink hearts. It is a kitchen of our times.
Like many, Claudia and her husband have spent the recession improving their home. "We have done a whole house revamp," she says. They took it back to bare brick, replumbed, rewired, put in new windows and a new roof, tanked the cellar and converted the loft to turn it from a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house into a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home. They moved out during the disruption. "We bought it five years ago, so its value has gone up in spite of the recession and we won't have lost money," she says. That is a relief. Claudia, a Condé Nast fashion and beauty editor, has been lucky.
"We always planned to do it," she says. "I have a big family and we have lots of people over for meals. I was always stuck at the back in a poky kitchen, while they were having a jolly time in the dining room." Now they can eat at the old oak kitchen table on gleaming oak flooring, with the windows folded away in summer and a barbecue smoking just outside. It is a whole lifestyle transplant, a space where bistro meets hip.
But they are selling to take on another project and there is no doubt that, despite the recession, the makeover has made a difference to the price. Without the remake a house in Peterborough Road, Fulham, like theirs, would be worth around £950,000 instead of the £1.195m placed on it by John D Wood (020 7731 4223).
Estate agents know that a kitchen sells a house. "People enjoy pretending to be Nigel or Nigella, showing off organic produce and celebrity cookware," says William Kirkland of John D Wood in Oxford. "Hosts want to be in the midst of the action, not cut off down the hall."
"Living rooms in which we cook is what we should call our kitchens now," says designer Johnny Grey, who is the nephew of the late, great cookery writer Elizabeth David. They are where families come to feast, fight and party: "Kitchens in name but not in spirit."
So important are they that making a good one often means removing old walls and corridors and shifting a back or side entrance. "Car boot to kitchen is an important journey," Johnny says.
You might think that the recession would have stopped all gastronomic aggrandisement, but it has not. Johnny says that many middle-market kitchen suppliers have gone under but home owners have simply become more resourceful. "For too long the kitchen business has been sales-driven with low standards of design. They have been a great machine for moneymaking."
He now predicts a rise in what he calls "barefoot design", which means people buying a design-only service, with a contacts list. They arrange craftsmen, installers, plumbers and electricians themselves.
"We are already doing four or five a year," Johnny says. "This is partly because people want a service which they cannot quite afford anymore, but it can be fun."
So what are we looking for? More light, more space, views to the garden? All these, but we also want the comfort of the kitchen table, or "the sweet spot". Kitchens are bound up with our childhood myths and stories, our ideas of home. "People find the kitchens they dream of are often bound up with those they read about in children's books," Johnny says.
And he thinks we will see a return of the pantry. "It is cheap to build, just masonry and shelves," he says. It swallows the dry goods, keeps the fruit and veg chilled without need for refrigeration and becomes a haven for cold puddings and pies. You know it makes sense.
But we are hi-tech too. The central island has become de rigueur.
Indeed, some top-end designers say millionaires are demanding two islands rather than one, just as they need two fridges and sometimes even two kitchens (one for television suppers, another large enough for full catering staff).
"If the world is closing in a bit because of the financial crisis and global warming, where do we retreat to? To the kitchen, where we can feed ourselves and have friends over instead of eating out," Johnny says.
"What we will see is the rise and rise of the kitchen."
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