Adaptive Kitchens:
Designing and Building Kitchens for Real People

Not every homeowner has the space, budget or need for the expansive House and Garden-style Hollywood kitchen with its acres of floor space, drop-down and pullout laborsaving devices in every nook and cranny and grand cabinets from floor to ceiling. In fact, most people don't. This does not mean you cannot have a great kitchen that you will use and enjoy for years to come. It just has to be adapted to your situation. We must design it with you in mind and build it using the latest cost-saving construction methods. We do both.

The process is called "adaptive design and construction". And while there the concept has a whole host of fancy definitions, all it really means is adapting your kitchen to fit you rather than building a cooker-cutter standard kitchen and requiring you to adapt to it.

Featured here are two examples of adaptive design and construction. One is a good example of ergometric design (see right_panel, above). All this means is that we modified the standard kitchen to fit a kitchen design to the physical characteristics and movement patterns of its owners.

In the second example, the owners wanted more kitchen than their budget allowed. This required a process of paring down the design, keeping the essential features and modifying or discarding the rest until the cost of their kitchen matched their budget.

Adapting a Kitchen to the Human Body

Few homeowners are of average height, average girth; have average reach or average range of motion or use their kitchens in an average way. Yet almost all kitchens are arranged and sized using standards written for a mythical average person. Unless you happen to be that perfectly average person, standard kitchen dimensions and configurations may not be right for you. Here is how we adapt a kitchen to the physical characteristics and limitations its owners.

Adapting a Grand Kitchen to a Limited Budget

If you feel you cannot afford a great kitchen, think again. A terrific kitchen does not have to break the bank. You may have to get creative and even make a few compromises in your original grand design, but you will end up with a wonderful kitchen that will look good and serve your needs for years to come. Here's how we took a design for a very expensive kitchen and fit it into a reduced budget through careful redesign, selective substitution of materials and economic construction practices.

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Kitchen Ergonomics

The word "Ergonomics" comes from two Greek words "ergon", meaning work, and "nomos" meaning "laws". Today, however, the word is used to describe the science of "designing the environment to fit the person, not forcing the person to fit the environment."

Ergonomics covers all aspects of the human-environment relationship, from the physical stresses body motion places on joints, muscles, nerves, tendons, bones and the like, to environmental factors which can effect hearing, vision, and general comfort and health.

Ergonomics is very popular now. People may not know exactly what it means, but know that an ergonomic chair, knife handle, or spatula is likely to be more confortable and often better looking. So, since ergonomics sells, everything under the sun is suddenly "ergonomic". Kitchens should be, bit seldom are.

The kitchen — unlike most other rooms in the home — is a workplace. The job of preparing and serving meals gets done there. Making that environment fit you is a most critical factor in your satisfaction with your kitchen.

Are you tall, short? How far can you reach? If you cannot comfortably reach upper cabinets, then you do not want to store most frequently used items there. If you cannot bend to reach lower cabinets, extensive pullouts may be a good option in your kitchen. Your eyesight is a factor in planning illumination. Studies have shown that a person in his or her 50s with good eyesight still needs 100% more light to read by than that same person in his or her 20s.

While there are good general design rules governing kitchen design, they are just that —general— and need to be modified to fit you. Adapting your kitchen to you is a large part of the design process.  If your kitchen does not fit your physical characteristics and your work style, it may be handsome and fresh, but it will not be comfortable, and you won't be happy.