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 My Biography The name of my company, Kitchen Design with Cooking in Mind, is also the name of my book. Donald E. Silvers is my name and I'm a Certified Kitchen Designer (CKD), kitchen design teacher at UCLA, and am known as Dr. Kitchen on the Internet. I am also a retired professional chef and a cooking teacher. As a matter of fact, 25 years ago I was teaching cooking for UCLA. I have been designing residential and commercial kitchens for more than 30 years. As a kitchen designer, I've put together or consulted on more than 1,000 kitchens. As a professional chef, I've overseen preparation of anywhere from one to 6,000 meals a day. My previous career as a chef puts me in a unique position as a kitchen designer which allows me to design kitchens that are not only beautiful but functional. A beautiful and functional kitchen is an extraordinary joy to work in as well as an aesthetic environment. Unfortunately very few people have ever had the chance to really work in the kind of kitchen that I design. I can give you both kinds of expertise you need - kitchen design and culinary expertise. Finding the right kitchen designer calls for more than finding someone who understands budgets, plans, and materials - it also requires someone who understands the cooking process. At some point your going to want to cook in your kitchen! It is sad to say, but most kitchen designers only understand the technical aspects of kitchen design, like selling and installing kitchen cabinets. Rarely do kitchen designers talk about how the kitchen will be used to cook, and design specifically to accommodate the cooking process. As a chef and cooking teacher, turned commercial and residential kitchen designer, I am often at odds with the kitchen design community. Not because I want to be, but because of the differences in the training given to me versus the kitchen design industry. The average kitchen designer I know works from a concept called the kitchen triangle (draw a triangle putting the stove at one point, sink at another point, and refrigerator at the other point). What made this concept so pervasive needs to be explained. The concept emerged from a limited space housing that was conducted at the University of Illinois in the early fifties. In formulating the best ways to make use of small residential spaces, they developed a kitchen design that connected the three major appliances refrigerator, sink and stove as the three points of a triangle. This single, simple plan was standardized and soon became widely popular with the design industry and consumers alike. The problem with the kitchen triangle concept, however, is that it is static. An appliance is located at each of the three fixed points, creating a formation that cannot be compressed or expanded to accommodate greater or lesser amounts of food or guests. In other words, it does not understand volume. Neither can the triangle adjust to tolerate additional people working in the kitchen at the same time. Nor are options provided for extended workspace. In other words, it is a design based largely on a geometric figure rather than on cooking and it’s end result. In addition, in those days of the creation of that concept, there was only a stove, refrigerator and single sink. I as a cook first learned my trade in the world of commercial kitchen design and I’ve taken those lessons and experiences and have applied them to residential design but of course on a smaller scale. There are certain similarities and some differences between commercial and residential design. If I was going to create a new kitchen for a restaurant, I would start by asking “What’s the menu?” Most restaurants are fairly focused so designing a kitchen is much easier than residential because the home cook may want a variety of options in their menu. By understanding the menu and understanding how much of it is frozen versus canned or fresh will tell me the kind of cold and dry storage I would need. The second question would be, “How many chairs or people will a restaurant sit and how many turns does the restaurant want to have during lunch and dinner?” Understanding those two things—what the menu is and what the volume will be produced off of that menu—then allows me to choose the appropriate appliances. So the buzzwords for a residential kitchen design is multiple water sources, appropriate counters, layouts with point of use in mind, good appliances. All of these factors must be built into the kitchen space. In addition, we must consider aesthetics and the fact that the kitchen is the most public intimate room. By putting in a clean-up sink area
in one location and a preparation sink in a separate location
actually will double the capacity of that space without breaking
down a wall. In addition, as a residential kitchen designer, we have
to consider cooking habits, house size, and dining room capacity.
The clean up sink must be near the dishwasher and in line with the highest frequency eating area so that dirty dishes can go directly from table to clean up area without crossing the path to the prep area. If the distance between the prep sink and clean up sink is great, you may want a dishwasher in the prep area as well. The key to a successful kitchen design is flow. For a kitchen to be fluid, every item in it must be carefully considered and placed. In my opinion, the right selection of major appliances is very, very important. Since my cooking teaching experience has taught me that you must maximize for the design needs and not minimize which creates the need for the appropriate selection of major appliances. When choosing an appliance the first question is how many people am I cooking for and how am I going to use it? The equipment used most frequently must be placed where it is easily accessible. For example, when selecting a refrigerator remember that you will use the refrigerator side much more often than the freezer. So unless you have special needs, models that have the freezer compartment on top as well as three foot side by sides are not great choices. The decision you have to make is how much do I work on top of the stove versus how much I use the ovens. Do I use a microwave or would I be better off with the new steam ovens on the marketplace. How many burners will I need? And if I do cook on top of the stove a great deal, will I have enough heat from the average burner. Heat. So very important. A term that is used in the restaurant industry is recovery ratio and it is as important for the residential marketplace. What is it? Well, let’s sauté a piece of chicken. Put in a little bit of olive oil in your pan and flavor it with two whole cloves of garlic. The sauce we’ll make on the side. We heat the oil until it is very hot (around 375 degrees) and then we put our chicken into the pan. We all assume the chicken gets hot and to a certain extent that’s true. However, it brings the temperature of the oil way down. Before the oil can enter into the chicken because it’s not hot enough we need enough heat (BTUs or British thermal units) to bring the oil temperature back to its original temperature so the chicken can be sealed and in fact the chicken does not become greasy. Be sure to make sure that your large burners are up front because that’s where you sauté. You must examine all of your
appliances in context to your specific needs. And remember volume,
is the real indicator hear. My rule is that a kitchen must be
capable of having the space compress or expand for a given need at a
given time. There was a woman by the name of Georgie Boynton Child who wrote a book called The Efficient Kitchen. She took the architechts to task for not understanding point of use which simply means everything is in the kitchen where I need it. That reflects in far fewer steps for me to take. I can do one hour’s work in one hour’s time. The problem of point of use is till pervasive because unless the kitchen designer cooks and understands intimately what works in kitchen we will continue to build rollerskate kitchens. Interestingly enough the book was published in 1914. When we use the word functional the average designer says to me, “It can’t be pretty.” For the life of me, I don’t understand why it can’t be beautiful. Often I will put a sink at one end of the island so I get as much continuous counterpace as possible. Architects and designers are not happy with me because I didn’t center the sink in the island. But if you do a kitchen logically, even though it may be asymmetrical it can still be gorgeous. And the beauty of designing from a functional point of view is that I can use standard cabinetry which will help with the budget.
Here are a few results of a kitchen designed without the cooking process in mind. Check off what's wrong with yours:
If cooking is a priority for you, finding the right kitchen designer means finding a kitchen designer that knows how to cook and plan space. Badly designed kitchens - those that are not designed to accommodate the cooking process - can not only make your kitchen experiences miserable, but make you work three times harder. |
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Your
kitchen doesn't allow you to cook what you want when you want.
