Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Was More Than Her Hyperorganized Kitchen
When a flood destroyed our apartment’s kitchen some years ago, my wife and I made sure to cram as much utilitarian satisfaction as we could into its replacement, a space roughly six feet by 10 made almost luxurious by a window. With every quarter-inch accounted for, we knew where the knife block would sit, how close a wall outlet needed to be to the stove, and which pots had to fit into which drawer. We specified a cubby for oven mitts, another for cutting boards, and a slot for a folding step stool. The tinfoil drawer cleared the refrigerator handle by millimeters. Utensils, ingredients, and appliances are only ever one, two, or two and a half steps away. You’d think such a compact command center would accept only a single cook at a time, but, at the cost of a couple of collisions and one or two smashed glasses, my wife and I have developed a close-dance choreography of working together. Still, it’s the opposite of the high-end open kitchen — no island, no barstools, no guests gathering around the counter. Its conceptual ancestor is the Frankfurt kitchen, designed a century ago for the working class by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.