Trends in the Kitchen industry
Big business
The money spent on them has risen with their status. In America the kitchen market is now worth $170 billion, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association—five times the country's film industry. In the year to August 2007, IKEA, a Swedish furniture chain, sold over 1m kitchens worldwide. The average budget for a “major” kitchen overhaul in 2006, calculates Remodeling magazine, was a staggering $54,000; even a “minor” makeover cost on average $18,000. What the great hall was to the medieval castle and the parlour was to the Victorian terrace, the kitchen is to the 21st-century home.
5 times the size of the film industry? wow!
Trend:
going up scale, making them exclusive. for example; Robinson & Cornish, a British maker of bespoke kitchens, offers a Georgian-style one which would cost £145,000-155,000 ($290,000-310,000)—excluding building, plumbing and electrical work. Its big selling point, the publicity suggests, is that nobody else will have it: “You won't see this kitchen in Hello.”
Estate agents commonly use photographs of kitchens to sell properties.
The elevation of the room that once belonged only to the servants to that of design showcase for the modern family tells the story of a century of social change.
They used to be in the back of the house....a place for servents. kitchens were for servants, and the aspiring middle classes wanted nothing to do with them. Only the poor and the servants ate in the kitchen. The master of the house scarcely set foot beyond the green baize door; the mistress only to supervise. The kitchen's comfort, let alone its aesthetics, were of little concern to them. (sounds like Brazil still to today)
But as the working classes prospered and the servant shortage set in, housekeeping became a matter of interest to the literate classes.
Change
In the 1920s, three factors ushered in the modern kitchen. One was the influence of the European modernist movement, led by Bauhaus architects in Germany and Le Corbusier in France. Another was the development of electrical appliances. General Electric was promoting all manner of newfangled equipment, including the electric refrigerator, automatic clothes washer, pop-up toaster, electric coffee percolator, electric iron and automatic suction sweeper. Finally, the rising cost of servants boosted demand for such labour-saving devices. Lorain Gas Ranges advertised their new oven thermostat in 1926 as “The Answer to the Servant Problem”.
But revival as a hub of the home did not take place until women joined the workforce in big numbers, during the 1970s and 1980s.
Out went the idea of the kitchen as service area, where housewives scrubbed, chopped and boiled. In came the open family space, where friends hovered, teenagers grazed and children did homework.
Trends today
Says Jesper Brodin, global head of kitchens at IKEA: “Today, the dream of an open living kitchen designed for social use is universal.”
Certainly, European kitchen suppliers are thriving internationally. At Bulthaup, an upmarket German supplier, sales of kitchens in Asia tripled in the year to April 2007. Kitchens by Poggenpohl, another smart German brand, are selling well in Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul; it recently opened a showroom in Nairobi, Kenya. In the middle market too, IKEA is busy spreading flat packs and frustration into all corners of the globe: in 2008 it plans to add two more stores in China to the four it already runs there, for instance, and four more to its eight stores in Russia.
Brand-conscious Russians, it seems, are happy to have their taste dictated by design gurus in Stockholm and London. But if Americans and northern Europeans seek timelessness in natural wood, the newly rich Chinese and Russians tend to think high-gloss surfaces are a better reflection of modern designer living.
Even in the poorest parts of the world, a modern kitchen seems to have particular aspirational value.
The cult of the social kitchen has its limits, however. In China and Japan, modern city flats are usually too small to make a lived-in kitchen practical. IKEA says that its Chinese customers are concerned chiefly with how to make the most of small cooking spaces, not with creating open-plan areas. IKEA's Mr Brodin says smoky wok-cooking also makes the open kitchen less appealing there. According to a 27-country survey for IKEA by IsoPublic, a polling firm, less than 20% of Chinese families eat in the kitchen compared with 64% of Canadian and over 50% of American ones.
The more traditional family roles are, the less likely the kitchen is to be used as a living area. In Sweden, 30% of households say that the man is the main cook, and nearly two-thirds of families socialise in their kitchen, according to IsoPublic. At the other end of the scale, less than 5% of Saudis use their kitchen socially, and a man is the main cook in just 3% of households.
The French too seem to be reluctant to bash down the kitchen wall and let their guests in. In the land of gastronomy, separate dining-rooms remain common—and an open well-designed kitchen is known as une cuisine américaine. In Paris, the architecture of 19th-century apartments, combined with a formal eating culture, has generally kept the kitchen hidden away at the end of a narrow corridor, overlooking a gloomy interior courtyard. The French, along with the Portuguese and Spanish, do the least socialising in the kitchen among western Europeans—half as much as Swedes and Finns. Despite the fashion for open kitchens in new designer gourmet restaurants in Paris, food-preparation in the home is still often considered an art to be mastered backstage.
Kitchen manufacturers are responding with a cool, harder-edged look, designed to appeal to masculine taste. Poggenpohl is shortly to introduce a new model designed specially for men, in aluminium, dark gloss and glass—a “sleek and functional design language specifically addresses male customers”. It comes complete with an in-built high-tech audio-visual system. It even includes a cooker.
Appliance manufacturers are also beaming music, TV and the internet into the kitchen, in part to meet what are considered male demands. Various manufacturers have introduced a digital TV refrigerator, with a built-in LCD screen on the fridge door. Electrolux has a model with an internet screen built in above the fridge doors, complete with a bar-code-detected food stockage and ordering system.
What with wireless and digital entertainment zones, kitchens have come a long way from the era of the open fire and blackened pot. Kitchen designers plainly think that the lure of state-of-the-art multi-media gadgetry will pull more men into the kitchen in the future. And they may well be right. But whether they go there in order to stuff a mushroom, or rather to download music and stick a frozen chicken tikka in the microwave, is probably an open question.
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