Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Common House kitchens/ open closed design

[Grindlay, Francis (fgrind]

To who ever the system administrator is.... Please delete me from this
e-mail list as I am no longer going to work here   Thankyou

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Sandelin [mailto:floriferous [at] email.msn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 28 July 1999 16:58
Subject: RE: Common House kitchens/ open closed design


This is a good example of why a good searchable archive would be very
useful
for this list. This  topic came up within the past year and got several
responses. So note that I changed the subject header on my reply to be
more
specific so future work towards an archive will be easier.

Ahem, now to my reply,

Sharingwood has an open kitchen, you walk in the front door, and after
the
lobby the kitchen is to your right, the serving area is to your left.
There
are no barriers. Noise is a NON-ISSUE. I wish CH designers would get
over
this fear of noise. The noise of the dinner participants easily dwarfs
any
pot banging that goes on during dinner prep or clean up. We have our
scullery (dishwasher) in a seperate alcove and the noise from that does
not
intrude on conversation in the least. I suppose if somebody was doing
dishes
during our Sunday morning Yoga class the noise would be noticable, but
its
not a problem at all during meals.

The advantages of an open design are obvious, you feel like you are
connected and people stop in and lend a hand easily. You are not cut off
from seeing your kids play, people during pre-dinner talking, etc. It
encourages people to stop by and say hello to the cooks. Remember, this
is
supposed to be a social experience, including the food preparing. That's
the
point of community dinner, is to chat with neighbors.

I suppose the disadvantage is that from the dining area you can see the
kitchen mess, and of course, walking by the kitchen too close means you
might be recruited to carry the salad or peel a cucumber as you chat
with
your neighbors. I will repeat again for those that missed it, noise is
not
an issue in the slightest, not from the kitchen anyway.

We do 4 dinners a week and a breakfast on Saturday, the number of
partipants
varys from a low of 20 to a high of 45. If there is an average, we have
defied setting it, it always seems random although numbers seem higher
in
the winter, lower in the summer.

I don't have a clue how the kitchen makes the slightest difference to
our
community other than its easy to use. The most frequent complaint is
about
the lighting in the winter, or about the quality of the knives.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communties Association
Building a better society, one neighborhood at a time