Counter revolution: how the kitchen changed in the 20th century

Throughout her life, my nan loved to have an immaculate modern kitchen but she hated cooking. Instead, she embraced convenience food and the microwave. She was bemused when I installed an open-plan kitchen in my house. Why on Earth would I want to eat in the kitchen with all that mess on display?

From the vantage point of 2024, this question can seem rather quaint. For millions of Britons today, eating in the kitchen is second nature – and the open-plan kitchen (that multi-purpose space where we store, prepare and cook food, host friends and, since the pandemic, carry out a day’s work) has become something of a status symbol.

Evolution of the 20th-century kitchen

How things have changed. At the dawn of the 20th century, it was only the working and lower-middle classes who cooked, ate and socialised in a single room. In wealthier households, the tasks of storing, preparing, cooking and eating food were performed in distinct areas. Food preparation was confined to the kitchen, dishes were washed in the scullery (often in the basement), and meals were taken in an entirely different dining room. In bigger houses there would be a separate pantry as well as a larder.

Since then, society has evolved beyond all recognition, and so has the kitchen. In fact, it has probably been subject to more changes than any other room in our houses. Because of the way gender roles were historically divided, this reflects the evolving status of women: from mistress of the household and ‘maid-of-all-work’ to home economist and multi-tasking homeworker.

Britain’s kitchen revolution began to gather momentum in the wake of the First World War when the country was beset by a servant crisis. During the conflict, hundreds of thousands of working-class women had answered the call to work in munitions factories and other traditionally male-dominated industries.

This was meant to be a short-term solution. But many of these women preferred their new vocation to the poor pay and isolation of being a ‘maid-of-all-work’ in the homes of the wealthy – and chose not to return.

• Read more | Young guns: the women and children of WW1 munitions factories

Meanwhile, soaring inflation persuaded many middle-class families that they could no longer afford to employ servants. The question was, who – or what – was going to fill the gap vacated by the long-suffering maidservant?

Labour-saving innovations

One possible solution lay across the Atlantic. In the second decade of the 20th century, the American home economist Christine Frederick began drawing on time and motion studies originally developed for factories to promote the idea of a labour-saving kitchen to aid women now increasingly seen as professional housewives.

It wasn’t long before Frederick’s research had reached the German textile artist and designer Benita Otte, who conceived what is arguably the world’s first fitted kitchen in 1923. Otte was a member of the hugely influential Bauhaus School, which made its name championing the rationalist principles of Modernism such as ‘form follows function’.

Her compact kitchen was solely devoted to the preparation of food, with simple wall-mounted cupboards boasting hygienic flush doors, painted white, mounted over a continuous worktop. It was intended to eliminate unnecessary movement and streamline the cooking process. The principles of her trailblazing design represent the essence of what we understand to be a fitted kitchen today.

American home economist Christine Frederick began drawing on time and motion studies originally developed for factories to promote the idea of a labour-saving kitchen to aid women now increasingly seen as professional housewives

Christine Frederick’s ideas would go on to gain wider influence through the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who designed a fitted kitchen for a mass housing project in Frankfurt. Some 10,000 were installed between 1926 and 1932. Schütte-Lihotzky’s deliberately narrow, compact kitchen was not only the result of space constraints but also a preoccupation with shaving time off kitchen tasks.

It positioned women as sole workers in the kitchen, servicing their families efficiently. You entered the kitchen via a sliding door on one of the short walls. Opposite this was a worktop with a stool on revolving castors. On the left was a freestanding cooker and, on the right, a sink and wall cabinets. Cupboards included labelled metal storage bins and a removable waste drawer. The wooden cabinets were even painted in a shade of blue that, it was claimed, repelled flies.

Although it was intended to liberate users from the drudgery of the kitchen by allowing tasks to be completed as efficiently as possible, Schütte-Lihotzky’s brainchild was not always received positively. Some women complained that it isolated them from their families and made it difficult to look after children.

When it was rolled out in housing schemes in Finland, others lamented that it left little room for cherished items of furniture that had been passed down the generations. Families squeezed their table into the kitchen to allow them to eat there and their children to do homework, even if they had to do so in shifts.

The kitchenette: the ultimate “stepsaver”

Britons were slower to adopt the fitted kitchen than many of their counterparts on the continent. From Colchester to Cardiff, Exeter to Edinburgh, the freestanding kitchen cupboard cabinet, otherwise known as the ‘kitchenette’, held sway.

As domestic advice writer Nancie Clifton Reynold observed in 1929: “In the really modern kitchen, where the method of a place for everything and everything in its place is followed, and where space is of the utmost importance, there is nothing to compare with the kitchen cabinet for convenience. It is true that the compact cabinet is the greatest stepsaver yet invented.”

Kitchen cabinets had emerged in the United States in the 1890s and were popularised by the manufacturer Hoosier. They comprised a base cupboard, sometimes with drawers, topped by a pull-out enamelled worktop. Above this was a shallower cupboard whose doors revealed shelves with storage compartments, equipped with jars and containers and a special funnel-shaped ‘hopper’ to dispense flour.

Britain caught the kitchen cabinet bug in the mid-1920s when they became available in a range of prices (a version brought to the market by Hygena in 1925 proved particularly popular). They would remain a mainstay of British homes throughout the interwar housebuilding boom, often being offered in situ in suburban semis.

Dream kitchens in postwar US

While Britain’s passion for kitchen cabinets intensified, Americans were transferring their affections elsewhere – to an ever more sophisticated fitted kitchen industry. Leading the charge was Lilian Moller Gilbreth – psychologist, industrial engineer and mother of 12 – who applied time and motion studies she developed with her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, to the organisation of family life.

Such studies led Lilian to advocate a kitchen triangle plan of cooker, fridge and sink that is still in widespread use today. The Gilbreths’ research was showcased in the book Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948. By now, America stood on the cusp of an economic boom – and that boom was reflected in the home.

Soon, American kitchens boasted modular cabinets in an array of primary and pastel colours, with coordinating cookers, fridges and even dishwashers. These dream kitchens, with their streamlined fridges full of food, were immortalised in Hollywood films and TV series such as I Love Lucy (1951–57). British audiences, who were subject to food rationing until 1954, could only look on in wonder and envy.

Prefabs clad in Formica

But British consumers weren’t completely frozen out from this brave new world of domestic form and function. In the postwar period, those with the aspiration (and, more pertinently, the money) could buy American-style fitted kitchens in aluminium from companies such as English Rose. And, of course, fitted kitchens graced many of the thousands of prefabs constructed across Britain in the aftermath of war.

Few fitted kitchens were more popular than those produced by Hygena, whose colourful and innovative designs dominated the market until the 1970s. At the heart of their offering was that hard, durable plastic known as Formica – or, as marketers preferred to call it, ‘the surface with a smile’. By the mid-1950s, Hygena’s F range was fully prefabricated (and fully clad in Formica) and offered in a range of colours, with the most popular being red worktops, blue doors and white drawers.

The culture of buying and fitting kitchens was also evolving. Hygena’s advertising in the early 1970s stressed that their cabinets were available in single units that could be bought one at a time, enabling consumers to build up their kitchen piece-by-piece.

Few fitted kitchens were more popular than those produced by Hygena... At the heart of their offering was that hard, durable plastic known as Formica – or, as marketers preferred to call it, ‘the surface with a smile’

However, in 1976 Hygena cautioned would-be DIYers against building their ‘Continental’ kitchen from flat-pack boxes. The ‘Hygena man’, the company (perhaps unsurprisingly) urged, could do the job much more quickly. Yet, despite such warnings, it wasn’t long before flat-pack retailers such as MFI were muscling-in on the scene. The age of the self-build kitchen had arrived.

It wasn’t just DIYers who posed a threat to Hygena’s business model. The second half of the 1970s witnessed the rise of the ‘country’ kitchen, as a yearning for simpler times – exemplified by Tom and Barbara in the hit BBC sitcom The Good Life – washed over the nation.

Where Formica-clad modernity had once reigned supreme, now Britons hankered after antique dressers stripped of their paint and varnish, and pine doors with traditional mouldings and wooden or brass knobs. Terence Conran’s Habitat store – not to mention his kitchen books – popularised what the historian Ben Highmore has called ‘spontaneous informality’ around a stripped pine kitchen table, influenced by continental holidays and cookery.

Women's rights and marks of individuality

The 1970s and 80s witnessed a number of societal shifts that would have a direct impact on kitchen design. In 1973, women in Britain were allowed, for the first time, to take out a loan or credit card without having to rely on their husband or father as a guarantor. This meant that they now had more say in the purchase of new kitchens – and advertising and design changed accordingly.

Whereas, in the 1960s, kitchens in larger homes were often divided from dining rooms by a hatch through which the housewife served her family, now they were increasingly being replaced by open-plan designs with a peninsular or breakfast bar.

The kitchen industry was given a further boost by the 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ legislation that saw installing a new kitchen as a mark of individuality amid a boom in private ownership. These aspirations were immortalised in an episode of 1990s BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances in which Hyacinth Bucket tries to take out an ad in the local newspaper to proclaim that she has installed a new fitted kitchen.

Kitchens to the celebrity chefs

While TV in the 1990s reflected Britons’ evolving tastes in kitchen design, by the new millennium it was driving them – thanks, in part, to the inexorable rise of the celebrity chef. From the early 2000s, the likes of Nigella Lawson, Ainsley Harriott and Jamie Oliver were beamed into millions of homes on an almost daily basis.

And the piece of hardware on which they prepared their culinary masterpieces was often the kitchen island, which proved the perfect surface on which to cook while presenting to camera. It wasn’t long before the island became an object of desire for homeowners across the country.

By now, the rise of the TV cookery show – not to mention the popularity of sitcoms such as Friends, many of whose scenes were played out in kitchen-diners – was influencing a trend for open-plan designs, often accompanied by industrial stainless surfaces and appliances.

All the while, British homeowners were subject to a Norse invasion. The advent of the first Ikea store in 1987 saw simpler, Scandinavian-inspired styles shape domestic kitchens. In 1996, one campaign launched by the Swedish company urged the British to turn their backs on tradition and “chuck out your chintz”.

Future as a shared space

This was less than three decades ago, but much has changed since. Home ownership has been in decline since the financial crash of 2008, meaning that many have little choice over the design of their kitchen, and that it is often a space that is rented and shared with others. Open-plan has perhaps lost some of its allure since the lockdowns of 2020–21 when multiple people in the same household started working from home.

So, what might the kitchen of the future look like? We are, I am happy to report, moving towards a more sustainable kitchen that can be manufactured from old units and endlessly recycled. The dream kitchen of 2024 affords a multiplicity of functions and uses; not only cooking and eating, but also leisure, entertaining and work. It can even incorporate space for pandemic pooches.

The kitchen island remains aspirational, clad in white marble, glowing like an abstract sculpture. Behind it, a bank of larder doors in dark green or blue, reflects a trend for nature. This hides a kitchen counter, under which are deep drawers, aiding accessibility. The doors conceal built-in appliances with WiFi-enabled ‘smart’ functions that can guide us through a recipe, and an ‘appliance garage’ for the ubiquitous air fryer. There is even a porcelain worktop with embedded convection hotspots, removing the need for a separate hob.

I can’t help wondering what my Nanny Nora would have made of all this. She would have approved of everything being hidden away, and she would have been an enthusiastic adopter of the air fryer to reheat things. But I can’t see her being enamoured of the performative kitchen island, having told the staff in her care home – quite proudly – that she had never, ever baked a cake.

Deborah Sugg Ryan is professor of design history and theory at the University of Portsmouth. She is writer and presenter, with Ruby Tandoh, of the Archive on 4 history of the fitted kitchen, Fitted and Kitted, available on BBC Sounds