Why you should be considering a freestanding kitchen

Fitted kitchens may be our default approach, but opting for freestanding furniture can produce a much more characterful room, and you can take it with you when you move
 

Kitchens are part of our social history. Think of the below-stairs, smoke-darkened kitchen of the Georgian townhouse; an out of sight workhorse where exhausted servants slept next to blackened ranges. The post Second World War years saw the rise of the fitted kitchen designed to house new appliances like the washing machine–emancipatory emblems of a new era. In the 1980s Sloane Rangers installed Agas and folksy, hand-painted tiles in their Fulham terraces to satisfy rural yearnings. By the Noughties, kitchens had become status symbols. Back walls were blitzed and glass extensions bolted on to house designer cabinets and islands the size of lakes for testing out Nigella’s latest. In more sober times, all that glossiness feels unpalatable. Hence the return of the freestanding kitchen: pottery-festooned dressers, trestle tables, glazed cabinets mixed with a few fitted pieces in a low-key pot pourri of styles.

Lockdown also lies behind the shift to the undone look. We spent most of our time in our kitchens; working, eating or bickering with our teenagers over who finished the oat milk or forgot to put the rubbish out. Incarcerated within four walls, we began to think about our kitchens should make us feel. Suddenly those bashed out, open-plan spaces with their glacial finishes didn’t feel quite so appealing. Warmth, tactility – and a quiet nook to perch with your laptop – that is what more of us are craving.

The environment is another factor. Fitted kitchens can run in to five figure sums, but you can’t take them with you. Estate agents will tell you that kitchens are meant to add value. I have yet to hear of anyone buying a property for its worktops. It is the space that counts. The truth is that whoever buys your home is likely to rip out your kitchen at a later date. The carcasses – often tricky to recycle – usually end up languishing in a landfill. To be clear. We are not advocating that you rip out your hard-won kitchen. But if you are starting from scratch, then a few built-in cupboards with portable pieces – preferably antique or made from natural materials – is a judicious and earth-friendly option.

And there are no rules. Industrial, rustic, Scandi, Downton-esque Edwardiana – it can all work. One of my favourite kitchens (along with Monet’s joyful, blue and white one at his home in Giverny) doing the Instagram rounds is Belgian designer JP de Meyer’s – a gleaming row of steel units, a curtain-frilled chopping table against candy-coloured tiles sum up the current, free spirited culinary mood.

Designer Patrick Williams, of Berdoulat in Bath, has long ‘preached’ the idea of a space that “feels less kitchen-y, and more like a living room… it’s where we spend most of our time and it feels right to furnish it with furniture that looks as if it has come together organically. We’d never fill our living rooms with pieces from the same shop. So why not the same for kitchens?” he says. “The proportions of fitted kitchens are dictated by the appliances they have to house,” he continues. “For our projects we use pieces chosen to reflect their architectural setting. If you have room, adding paintings or rugs always make a kitchen feel cosier and down to earth.”

Patrick, who named his business after the 18th-century house in France his parents painstakingly restored from scratch (memories of mixing the lime mortar linger on), draws on antiques for his designs: oak tables that do duty as worktops, charming plate racks and dressers are made in a local Somerset workshop. “I compare furniture to a folk song: no one really owns the designs, they are passed down and adapted and tweaked over time,” he explains.

Patrick and his wife live above their shop in Bath. Their kitchen, set in the former 19th-century storeroom, was loosely inspired by the kitchens of great houses – like Lutyens’s Castle Drogo, a mix of utility and beauty – which Patrick, who originally studied Fine Art, has explored over the years. An electric range sits next to a sink with an open pot shelf below and a traditional plate rack above; “It’s an efficient way of storing everyday plates and crockery so they are ready to use.” And of course, “they drip dry so you can avoid the skanky tea towel.”

Even the bin is worth ‘celebrating’: an old tin grain bin (with handy compartments for recycling) its pink surface mottled with a pleasing patina of time. Less aesthetic paraphernalia – the mixer, bowls or Tupperware – are concealed by a ‘hard-working’ glazed screen. “Things can be fairly chaotic but if you hide them behind a screen there is an order to them,” he adds.

Designer and antiques dealer Benedict Foley is another free-range advocate. His kitchen, in the Vale of Dedham cottage where he lives with his partner, the interior designer Daniel Slowik, is a jostling mix of ‘barely-fitted’ vivid blue cupboards against sunshine-bright yellow walls. A wonky, painted dresser teems with books, pottery, dangling mugs and ingredient-splattered cookery books. During lockdown, when Daniel took over the cooking, the dresser moved to suit his working methods. “The cookery writer Elizabeth David’s culinary arrangements are our touchstone for utility and logical beauty. They were workshop-like, with often-used items close to hand. Acres of blank fitted cupboards, in my experience, tend to harbour so many little used of those supposedly labour-saving devices,” says Benedict who has precise views on these matters.

“A pleasing dresser, sometimes hundreds of years old, will still do exactly what it was designed for, housing ceramics and oddments of whatever period you favour. And when you move, rather than abandoning your investment to the whims of someone else’s taste, you can take your kitchen with you in the same way you would your paintings and furniture,” he adds.

For her west London house, interior designer Sarah Brown worked with Plain English to plot a space that nods gently to its Edwardian setting. A bank of under counter cupboards, in fresco-pink, line one wall; antique French confit pots, in glowing glazes, sit on a shelf above. Instead of an island, which would have gobbled up the view of the garden, a convivial ‘chop and chat table’ – designed for doing just that – sits under the window.

For the first floor of a loftily-scaled Grade I Georgian townhouse, Nicola Harding adopted an equally sympathetic approach. A long table with a practical worktop serves as island in disguise: the Arts & Crafts oak table from Howe London with chairs in non-matching colours, sits beneath the sash window. Despite the grand proportions, this is very much a family space. The children’s artwork, specially framed, choruses against walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s ethereal ‘Setting Plaster’, chosen, says Nicola, “because it works at any light level, or any time of the year.”

For the first floor of a loftily-scaled Grade I Georgian townhouse, Nicola Harding adopted an equally sympathetic approach. A long table with a practical worktop serves as island in disguise: the Arts & Crafts oak table from Howe London with chairs in non-matching colours, sits beneath the sash window. Despite the grand proportions, this is very much a family space. The children’s artwork, specially framed, choruses against walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s ethereal ‘Setting Plaster’, chosen, says Nicola, “because it works at any light level, or any time of the year.”