Society and kitchens have evolved in parallel .
Ever since man became a carnivore and discovered how to use fire, dedicating a space to the preparation of food has naturally been a primary need, as has creating a variety of utensils with different functions facilitating the cooking, storage and handling of food.
In the days of the Roman Empire, the kitchen contained food storage areas, cabinets for storing pots and pans, a cooker with elements burning smouldering wood and a work surface, located in the outlying part of the home so that smoke and odours would not pervade the rest of the house. In patrician homes this was the realm of the servants, and this continued to be the case throughout the Middle Ages: the big kitchens of castles and palaces were huge production facilities where dishes where prepared for the numerous guests and sumptuous banquets of the lords and ladies, fitted with immense fireplaces with tripods on which to hang big copper, iron or brass cooking pots. The room was used exclusively for cooking food, and meals were eaten elsewhere.
Economic and social change in the 18th and 19th centuries
Not until the economic and social changes of the 18th and 19th centuries brought about an improvement in the economic condition of the lower and middle classes did the homes of ordinary people begin to contain spaces dedicated specifically to the cooking and storage of food. At first they were small, narrow spaces, but they grew larger to become among the most important rooms in the home.
The result is the introduction on the market of the first “kitchen furniture”, with a compartment under the cooking elements for storing wood or charcoal to be burnt. Not until later were stoves adapted to burn gas.
In the 19th century the structure of society slowly changed and the kitchen was no longer a workplace for servants but the reign of the woman of the house. This led to reflection on a series of sociological, psychological and political concerns about women’s position in society in response to the first feminist movements in Europe in the second half of the previous century.
Rational design comes up with the new kitchens
It was in this climate of thought and reconsideration of social positions, and partly due to the fact that women now found themselves managing the household alone, without servants, that Catherine Beecher designed a new, rational kitchen, drawing her inspiration from the kitchens designed for ships and using them as a model.
Beecher’s kitchen responded to the needs of bourgeois women such as herself and identified the ergonomic principles on the basis of which the room where meals were cooked should be constructed, assigning specific functions to different areas and specifying where to store utensils and foods.
After Beecher, between 1915 and 1922 Christine Frederick analysed the work performed in the kitchen in depth. Her so-called “thread studies” helped her measure the distances a homemaker travelled in the kitchen: she tied a thread to a woman which unrolled as she moved, creating a complex web of lines and allowing her to identify the most practical arrangement of furniture in the room.
Frederick’s book, “Household Engineering; Scientific Management in the Home”, provided the inspiration for Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous “Frankfurter Küche”, designed in the ’30s, the ergonomics and practicality of which became an archetype for today’s modular kitchens.
Characterised by extreme rationalisation of space, by a “U” shape ensuring that everything is close at hand, by continuous work surfaces, bright light in work areas, use of strong and long-lasting materials, and a layout designed to make trips from one position to another shorter, the Frankfurt Kitchen is the first true design applying engineering to furniture, and provided the principle inspiring a new concept of kitchen furniture.
With the passage of time, kitchen furnishings began to play a more and more important role in contributing to wellbeing in everyday life. Women played an increasingly dynamic role and were more often employed outside the home, so that they needed to make the most of the time they had for household chores. They therefore preferred to invest in high-performing furnishings and appliances that would help them with household tasks, especially now that the cost of household help had become exorbitant.
This made the kitchen a place for the woman of the house, who began to feel the need to work in a comfortable, pleasant place. This is where aesthetics become a key factor: a kitchen had to be not only functional and ergonomic, but beautiful, expressing the personal taste of the person who chose it.
The kitchen began to play a central role in the home and was opened up to include other functions in addition to the preparation of meals, becoming a place for socialising, intimacy and discussion that was one with the living area, opening onto it, with furnishings that connected the two areas.
From increasingly high performance, long-lasting materials to the most ingenious solutions for making use of space, from optimal positioning of windows to increasingly rigorous study of work areas, the design of today’s kitchens is truly the result of in-depth study of consumers’ needs and everyday behaviour.
Kitchen manufacturers aim to offer a product made to measure to fit all kinds of needs and combine extreme practicality with appealing design to suit all tastes.
SapienStone responds to the demand for beauty and practicality
SapienStone products perfectly suit the combination of beauty and practicality that now influences the choice of furnishings and more.
In the wake of the evolution of kitchen furnishings, the
SapienStone countertop responds effectively to a number of requirements.
Above all, the demand for durability and practicality: SapienStone porcelain is completely non-absorbent and resists high temperatures, abrasion, scratching and corrosive products. Maintenance is quick and easy: its uninterrupted surface can be simply wiped clean with a damp cloth, using a little degreaser if necessary, to guarantee the utmost hygiene.
SapienStone combines these technical properties making life in the kitchen easier with aesthetic research permitting creation of uninterrupted surfaces reproducing a number of different materials including marble, cement and various natural stones. The nineteen textures in the collection permit creation of kitchens in any style, from the most modern to the most classic.
What will the kitchen of the future be like?
The future of the kitchen seems to depend on two aspects: technology, and the ability to respond to a continually changing world.
Appliances have been evolving at top speed along with kitchens: originally designed to facilitate or speed up cooking, they are now designed to replace human beings in the planning and performance of domestic tasks wherever possible. This is the age of the Smart Kitchen, in which the appliances are interconnected, communicate and talk to their owners, who have complete control over the start-up and operation of all their appliances even from outside the home.
But the Smart Kitchen is only one of the responses to the changes in the way people experience the home, requiring more and more speed and liquidity. Today’s lifestyles require beautiful spaces capable of performing a variety of functions, and the kitchen becomes a place not only for preparing meals and dining, but for studying, working, chatting and entertaining guests.
In response to this new fluid lifestyle, SapienStone has worked in partnership with the Spanish company TPB Top Porzelanik Barcelona® to come up with a countertop with an integrated TPB®induction cooker featuring new generation induction elements and touch controls, making use of the cooking area particularly easy and intuitive. When it is not being used to cook food, the surface can be used in a variety of other ways: to eat on, to work on, or to perform any task requiring a work surface.
In response to a lifestyle increasingly oriented toward interchangeable spaces, items of furniture must be capable of performing a variety of different functions and acting as a trait d’union between connected spaces: the SapienStone porcelain countertop is the perfect item of furniture for joining the kitchen with the living room, or the kitchen with the offices: areas that often coexist in the same space, with no dividing walls.
In the kitchen of the future, embracing technological and functional evolution and expressed in innovative, visionary design, SapienStone countertops are an element of solution and synthesis: practicality is combined with high aesthetic impact in a high-tech product responding to a new way of living.
The editors.
