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Reading "A Kitchen For
Your Aching Back" gave me a headache... Dear Mr. Steiger, Ergonomics is the study of the human body in motion. This field has never been applied to kitchens—we just think it has. Countertops in kitchens are a standard 24-inches deep because the dishwasher invented by Thermador required them to be. Before that appliance, standard counters were 22-inches deep. If Thermador had designed a 27-inch deep dishwasher, that would now be the standard. The information Ms. Donelson touted as the latest strategy in kitchen design has been around for many years. I wrote an article de-bunking the effectiveness of the kitchen triangle in 1988. The "ergonomics" she refers to is the same concept as "point-of-use," a core guideline used by cooks (if not designers) for a very long time when deciding the layout of their appliances and the placement of their tools. Georgie Boynton Child wrote a book called The Efficient Kitchen in which she took architects to task for failing to understand and apply this basic concept to their designs. Her book was published in 1914. If you want to offer your readers new information and a fresh approach to design, take a look at the books I am including with this letter. The first is Kitchen Design with Cooking in Mind. As a retired chef and cooking teacher, I was a casualty of dysfunctional residential kitchen design. It prompted me to examine the tactics I used as a commercial kitchen designer and apply them to the home kitchen—on a smaller scale. The philosophy of design I describe in this book is simple to understand and easy to implement. It is a radical break from other design theories because it actually works. In a Don Silvers' kitchen, you can cook with ease for one person or twelve, and one hour's work takes only one hour. The philosophy I developed has been field tested in hundreds of home and restaurant kitchens. My clients will tell you—it stands the test of time. As you've probably been told many times, "The kitchen is the heart of the home." What you—and most homeowners—don't know is the appliances are the heart of the kitchen. The utility of the kitchen—defined by the variety of menus you can create and the ease of their preparation—depends entirely on the choice of appliances. Yet most designers choose them last of all because they don't understand their importance. Homeowners are at the mercy of designers and salespeople—most of whom know nothing about cooking. In 1990, I wrote an article called "Comment" for Kitchen and Bath Concepts. I criticized the appliance industry for producing terrible products—burners with low BTUs, refrigerators with poor layout, etc. The advances in the appliance industry over the last fifteen years demonstrate that they were paying attention. I just completed Kitchen Appliances 101: What Works, What Doesn't and Why, a primer for consumers, designers, architects, salespeople, builders and journalists. My co-author, Moorea Hoffman, and I painstakingly researched every model of every brand to determine what features truly impact the functionality of kitchen appliances. Our years of experience are distilled into ninety clear, concise, easy-to-read pages that take the mystery—and marketing hype—out of the appliance shopping experience. There is no other book that offers this kind of information. In closing, my writing partner, Moorea Hoffman, and I are experts you can call on for a fresh perspective on the billion-dollar remodeling industry. We can be your source for kitchen information that hasn't been re-hashed twenty times. |
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