Historical Walkthrough of the Kitchen Layout

I don't know if any of you will be interested (okay, I suspect Peaceable will be, but I wonder about the rest of you), but I've reconstructed what I believe to be the historical layouts of the kitchen.  I am actually not at home today (through a time-warp, I wrote this yesterday) but rather in southern Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Uncle, Aunt and The Texan.  So I'll keep this brief. (All the illustrations can be clicked on to make big enough that you should be able to read the  lettering.)

Here's my reconstruction of the original kitchen.  We aren't sure about the door to the foyer (shown on the left) and the top of the basement stairs. The entrance to the main part of the room between the corner of the range and the corner of the stairs would have been fairly narrow (I've probably under-drawn the size of the range here). And, there was an entrance to the back of the house through what is now the bathroom, so was there a need for two entries within 4 feet of each other?  However, the stair landing is significantly below the level of the floor, so there isn't much space for another basement entrance.  And, the paint markings left on the original lathe and plaster along that wall (opposite the stairwell) shows that there were originally cabinets as shown here.

The foyer closet (the large gray area encircled by stairs) was we believe added later -- possibly originally there were two doors in the foyer, one directly to the basement stairs, which would have wrapped around a central post. Or perhaps there was no door at all (just wall) from the front of the house to the kitchen, but that would be unusual compared to other blueprints of period houses that I've seen. (We do know that something weird has been done in the foyer, but we haven't figured out what. The whole room, walls and ceiling, was sheetrocked at some point, erasing all evidence of the original layout.)

The colors, from what we can tell, were dark stained fir cabinets, powder yellow and green walls. The backs of the cabinets (and the fronts?) were painted light green. The floor was one of the linoleums that we've found, possibly the green, gray and yellow brick-like pattern.

I've written earlier  that in the 1930s (I estimate) the huge range and boiler were removed and a "new" range and oven installed.  Then, the major remodel in the 1950s.

The ceiling was, of course, dropped, and all the upper cabinets were inset into soffits.  The basement stair wall was lengthened (or added) entirely -- it's not a load-bearing wall -- and a raised peninsula jutted out into the middle of the room like a thick arm around the new range. Over this, hanging from the newly dropped ceiling was a bank of cabinets, providing a narrow passthrough behind the stove. (Was there a bar, with stools, there? It would have been narrow.)  The door to the back room on the east wall was removed, the swinging door on the south wall pushed away from the corner and turned into a pocket door, allowing for a little nook with a table in it. Looking at the layout now, after months of pondering and destruction and rebuilding, I have greater respect for the planners and builders of that 1950s kitchen than I did at the start.  All of the cabinetry was well-constructed; the design allowed for a "work triangle" that was neat and tidy.

This was, however, a kitchen for Mom (and only Mom) to work in. Kids, I suppose, could sit at the table and do homework, supervised by Mom.  The hanging cabinets psychologically closed the room up; there is no room for two cooks, no room for now basic dishwasher or a microwave. To keep enough floor space, the counters are all shallower than standard nowadays -- only 18" deep on one side, 21" deep on the other -- so there is little room for standing mixers, coffee pots or toasters that clutter modern kitchens. (And the upper cabinets were hung only 15" over the base, and many appliances, such as coffee pots, wouldn't fit.)  The built-in cupboards on the south wall were 16" deep, fixed shelves over four huge drawers.  The shelves were so deep you could never find anything behind the first row, but not tall enough to used mini-shelves; the drawers, when full, were so heavy you couldn't open them.

The walls -- I've forgotten what HomoDommi told me, but I think everything was painted white when they moved in. The cabinetry was a golden pine, and the floor was a speckled gray and black linoleum with a line of red fronting all the cabinets.  I'll bet it looked sharp when it was brand new (it didn't 50 years later).

Here's what we're doing.  We've opened the kitchen space psychologically quite a bit, while narrowing the "hallway"space. New kitchen designs have dropped the concept of the "work triangle" and taken up the idea of "preparation spaces". Thus, we have a cooking space around the stove, a cleaning space around the sink, and a food prep space at the island and down in the south east corner of the room.  I'd guess fifteen cooks will be able to work in here at once (not really, but it's not limited to one).

We've returned the ceiling to its original height, but partly to mask structural repairs and partly because the ceiling is very high, we've installed shallow soffits over all the cabinets.  We've greatly increased the amount of counter space; added a dishwasher next to the sink (by shifting the sink over to the longer basement wall). Admittedly, the fridge is right at the furthest point it could be and still be in the kitchen, but that is not necessarily a bad thing for the way today's houses flow (all the books recommend having the fridge on the edge of the work space, so that "kids can get a drink without having to fully enter the cooking area").  Just to the right of the refrigerator is the space that was open chimney hole. To be honest, we're still working on how that space is to be used, but what we want is a small countertop for a landing spot for food from the fridge (with room for a stool beneath) and book shelves above.

It looks like we have drastically reduced the storage space of the room but the pantry will be an Ikea pullout -- providing us with 10 drawers, 2 feet long by 15 inches deep, so that we actually have as many linear feet of food storage room, and all but the top shelf is more accessible than the old way.

The colors. We chose a medium warm (almost orange) brown for the cabinetry; virtually the identical color cork floor (even though chosen two years before). All the vertical surfaces that are not cabinets (the walls around the window and doors, the soffits) will be an artisanal-looking "natural" plaster (American Clay) in a mid-level green. The countertops will be a speckled white granite, which is all the rage, and the appliances are all stainless steel (also, all the rage). The ceiling will be a pattern of tin tiles. Lighting is a combination of three hanging lamps centered down the middle of the room, a lamp over the sink, and undercabinet lighting.  Keep your fingers crossed that it all works.