‘Unfitted’ Kitchens Create Home Around the Range

When Johnny Grey looks at a kitchen, he sees a place for living, not just for preparing food.

His ideal kitchen is a large, sunny room with a big stone fireplace, comfortable couch or two, and a scattering of work stations in beautiful woods and curved lines, a mixing and matching of styles and periods.

“For me, the kitchen should raise the spirits and be a place of comfort and sociability,” says the English-born architect, whose thinking has been influencing kitchen design for more than a decade.

Grey, who designs upscale kitchens around the world from his London base and last year opened a San Francisco showroom, is credited in the kitchen design industry with popularizing the concept of the “unfitted” or “sociable” kitchen.

“Unfitted,” explained Grey, who has registered the term with the U.K. patent office, is “a philosophical idea relating to a more relaxed design which incorporates free-standing furniture where possible.”

“The kitchen should be the focal point of everyday existence,” declared the enthusiastic designer, who has traced the cultural role of the kitchen to the Middle Ages and the medieval great hall, which served as a multipurpose center for cooking and eating.

Grey’s “unfitted concept,” launched a decade ago, caught the demographic wave of changing family patterns and lifestyles.

The tight little kitchen of the post-World War II period was strictly utilitarian: Mom alone did most of the cooking for the nuclear family. Now with two-income or single-parent households, everybody pitches in, and the kitchen has become a gathering spot, said designer Kathleen Donohue of Portland, Ore., a consultant to the National Kitchen and Bath Assn., a trade group. “Now we entertain guests in the kitchen and the family gathers there.”

In fact, a kitchen revolution is underway. Banks of look-alike maple cabinets are beginning to be replaced by a rich assortment of free-standing components in new materials, silhouettes and finishes that have evolved, in part, from Grey’s unfitted concept.

Appliances are disappearing into drawers or behind sleek doors, or making major statements in noble stainless-steel industrial refrigerators, or ornately carved Tuscany stove hoods. Ergonomic considerations raise the dishwasher so you don’t have to stoop, and lower the pastry area for proper kneading action. Meticulously detailed drawers are fitted out for pans and lids, or equipped for recycling.

“The demand for kitchen remodels is high,” said Donohue, “and people want space that suits them exactly.”

In Grey’s opinion, the new kitchens have simply completed the circle, returning to the days when a kitchen hearth was the family gathering point.

Inspired by Poor Designs

He came up with the “unfitted” phrase after graduating from the London Architectural Assn. School of Architecture in 1977 and going to work as a designer.

“I did a few homes, and became aware of how badly designed and inhumane kitchens were,” he said in a recent telephone interview from London.

“In England, the kitchen had been hijacked by manufacturers of continuous counters made with Formica and laminate plastic facades, vinyl floors and strip lighting.”

In short, these kitchens were tightly fitted and sterile, a design driven by concern for hygiene and an optimism that science and technology could solve all problems.

The fitted-kitchen concept, which originated in post-World War II Germany and was swiftly snapped up in the United States, eventually reached its limits, he says.

“The kitchen was the only room in the house which felt like an over-planned factory. Some poor housewife had been sold all this cabinetry on the back of a hungry production line.”

Grey viewed such rooms as “cultural torture” and a dismal departure from the psychological role of the kitchen as a place of comfort and nurturing. Instead of considering people’s emotional lives, architects had sold out to the gods of efficiency.

“We had lost our way in the 1960s and ‘70s,” said Grey, whose enthusiasm for hospitable kitchens had been developed at an early age by visits with his aunt Elizabeth David, the noted food writer. Her cluttered main kitchen overflowed with tables loaded with objects, books and papers, a large French armoire to hold pots and pans, paintings, chairs and a chaise lounge for visitors.

It was a busy study-kitchen “enriched by happy conversations and delicious meals,” says Grey, an excellent chef himself who has been an evangelist for dynamic kitchens since.

He first tested his theories publicly in an 1980 article in the London Sunday Times headlined “Why This Awful Fixation With Fitted Kitchens.” He received 2,000 letters of inquiry, a bigger demand than he could hope to fill.

A few years later, he took his concepts to an adventurous design firm, Smallbone Inc. of Devizes, England.

“They made fitted kitchens and I said, ‘Let’s unfit them,’ ” Grey said.

By then he had developed his ideas more fully, with production drawings and manufacturing techniques, as well as training manuals for a sales staff.

Essentially, he liberated cabinets and appliances from the wall, developing new types of furniture for his custom-designed kitchens, and incorporating bold colors, exotic veneers, mosaics and hand-painted finishes.

“The most radical idea was that the units, or counters, were not expected to fit wall-to-wall, turning current practice on its head,” he said.

Grey’s work for Smallbone “started the revolution,” said Los Angeles design consultant Joe Ruggiero. “They were decorating with individual units as you would with furniture. A cooking area might be a free-floating stove with some kind of hood.”

The unfitted concept has been spreading through Europe and now is reaching the United States, added Ruggiero, host of two HGTV shows, including “Homes Across America.”

The Europeans are still leading the way with movable, or unfitted, kitchens, he added. “It’s amazing how many people in this country haven’t heard about it.”

Considering American consumers’ insatiable appetite for design at every level, it is only a matter of time until European and American kitchens are on the same page.

There is no “Johnny Grey” style as such, because he custom-designs each kitchen project. But his signature design elements--rounded edges, lots of color and different cabinet heights--are increasingly seen.

A survey of upscale showrooms in West Hollywood indicates that an ultra-contemporary European unfitted look is setting a high-fashion pace.

“Design is where it’s at,” said David Brownlow, studio director at the Snaidero Kitchens showroom in the Pacific Design Center. The showroom has just unveiled a new line of kitchen “environments” designed by Italian firm Pininfarina, utilizing the sculpted lines and high-fashion metallic lacquers of its famed Ferrari.

“The word now is ‘furniture’ not ‘cabinetry,’ ” added Brownlow. “It’s an open, sociable kitchen, a philosophy that was coined years ago by Johnny Grey.”

Because the new mix-and-match kitchens offer limitless options, the showroom staff must be design experts.

“We’re not just selling kitchen equipment,” said Chris Tosdevin, president of the sleek Bulthaup showroom on Robertson Boulevard. Tosdevin, who has a degree in interior architecture, has cultivated relationships with the design community to promote the German company’s fluid collection of contemporary cooking elements in stainless steel, glass, wood and stone.

Lifestyle Dictates Layout

Every client is interviewed at length about eating habits, entertainment styles and the amount of time spent cooking, said Tosdevin, whose outreach schedule includes monthly cooking classes with gourmet chefs in his showroom.

Bulthaup was the choice for architect Geoff Sumich of San Juan Capistrano when he remodeled his small house, combining the kitchen and dining room. He didn’t want to feel he was eating in the kitchen.

“I walked into the [Bulthaup] showroom and fell in love with the aluminum look,” he said. His collection includes separate elements for the sink, food preparation, oven and refrigerator. “You can move them around and rearrange the pieces, or stack them up. And you can take them with you when you move.”

Such flexibility can have its pitfalls, said Fari Moritz, who’s been in the business for 20 years as co-owner of Euro Kitchens in Laguna Beach. “There is an art in putting this all together,” she said. “If it’s not a good design, it could look odd.”

Her showroom carries SieMatic, a major European line with a contemporary Modula series that offers free-standing frames with a variety of shelves, drawers and appliances in elegant light wood tones and pastel shades.

“People are more design-oriented today. Years ago, they just wanted to fill up everything with cabinets. We’re seeing more acceptance today, especially among young people,” she said.

Getting the Word Out

Grey says he is spreading the word. He recently revised his amply illustrated book “The Art of Kitchen Design” (Sterling Publishing Co., 1999). It’s both a history of kitchens as social centers and a handbook for designing today’s kitchen.

“Now we can have Grandma’s hutch in the kitchen, rather than this obsession with continuous counters,” he says.

He and wife Rebecca have four children ages 5 to 16 and “an extremely well-used kitchen” in their Hampshire home outside London.

In addition to workshops scattered through England, he recently opened a Northern California showroom at the San Francisco Design Center. His stable of designers is working on kitchens in Ireland, Switzerland and the United States, including several in Northern California, and has just finished a couple in France. And though his kitchens are expensive--they can range from $80,000 to $200,000, including space planning from start to finish--he insists that his ideas can be adapted into a low-cost project for anyone prepared to do some work on it.

He thinks the unfitted kitchen has a big future.

“It’s inevitable in our hurried lives today, where both partners work, the only time you see each other is around the preparation and eating of food.

“It’s a very civilized concept.”