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A CONVENIENT AND WELL-EQUIPPED KITCHEN THAT SIMPLIFIES THE HOUSEWORK
EACH room in the house has its distinct and separate function in the domestic economy. Therefore it should be re-membered that before any room can attain its own distinctive individuality every-thing put into it must be there for some reason and must serve a definite purpose in the life that is to be lived and the work that is to be done in that room. Take for example the kitchen, where the food for the house-hold must be prepared and where a large part of the work of the house must be done. This is the room where the housewife or the servant maid must be for the greater part of hergood fortune to associate such a room with their earliest recollections of home. No child ever lived who could resist the attraction of such a room, for a child has, in all its purity. the primitive instinct for living that ruled the simpler and more wholesome customs of other days. In these times of more elaborate surroundings the home life of the family is hid-den behind a screen and the tendency is to belittle that part of the household work by regarding it as a necessary evil. Even in a small house the tendency too often is to make the kitchen the dump heap of the whole house-hold, a place in which to do what cooking and
Published in The Craftsman, September, 1905.
CORNER OF THE KITCHEN SHOWING BUILT-IN CUPBOARD AND SINK.
time day after day, and the very first requisites are that it should be large enough for comfort, well ventilated and full of sunshine, and that the equipment for the work that is to be done should be ample, of good quality and, above all, intelligently selected. We all know the pleasure of working with good tools and in congenial surroundings ; no more things than are necessary should be tolerated in the kitchen and no fewer should be required.
We cannot imagine a more homelike room than the old New England kitchen, the special realm of the housewife and the living room of the whole family. Its spotless cleanliness and homely cheer are remembered as long as life lasts by men and women who have had thedishwashing must be done and to get out of as soon as possible. In such a house there is invariably a small, cheap and often stuffy dining room, as cramped and comfortless as the kitchen and yet regarded as an absolute necessity in the household economy. Such an arrangement is the result of sacrificing the oldtime comfort for a false idea of elegance and its natural consequence is the loss of both.
In the farmhouse and the cottage of the workingman, where the domestic machinery is comparatively simple, cheerful and home-like, the kitchen, —which is also the dining room of the family and one of its pleasantest gathering places, —should be restored to all its old-time comfort and convenience. In
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