THE KITCHEN'S THE PLACE TO SHOW OFF
by Rosie Millard in the Sunday Times - an excerpt, the full article may be seen here

"If your home exudes bling, your kitchen must exude even more of it. Gone are the days when a well-appointed house could get by with a glorified scullery for culinary duties. The kitchen represents the beating heart of the modern home, and “well appointed” means just one thing: its cooking area is a knockout. More than any other room, it is a permanent display case for the aspirations, style, class and – to be honest – wealth of the owner.

Ideally, your handmade kitchen must be so glorious that it will fire up instant jealousy in anyone who comes to see it (in a nice way, of course). No wonder kitchen designers are taken more seriously (and paid more) than interior decorators. In they come, with their 3-D space-simulating computers and their swatches of stone, their ideas on peninsulas and suggestions for butcher’s blocks, stainless-steel splashbacks, butler’s sinks and all the rest. And the underlying aim of all this kit is for it to excite kitchen envy.

We all understand what kitchen envy means because we have all found ourselves at its mercy. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before “excites kitchen envy” makes its way into estate-agent speak "

Almost anything can provoke kitchen envy. A clutter-free island. A steam oven. A hot tap that provides boiling water at a touch. A built-in espresso-maker. The desired accessory doesn’t need to be ultramodern – it just needs to be intriguing. When I heard about a friend of mine who had installed a rotisserie spit in a medieval chimney breast at his home in the Dordogne, it was like a knife thrust into my breast.

Why are we all suffering like this? Because the middle classes, by and large the main proponents and victims of this condition, have got rid of the staff, you see. In returning to the humble handmade kitchen to cook our daily bread (in our Panasonic bread-makers), we have found ourselves hanging out there all the time, and so the kitchen has become a mirror of who we are. A highly codified one, but a mirror nonetheless.

“What people are actually envious of is not the kitchen itself, but the lifestyle that is displayed within that space,” says R.G., a kitchen designer “People come round, they see an open-plan kitchen, and there you are, cooking at the island, facing your guests, with a sushi bar at the back, demonstrating a clean, functional, chic lifestyle. That’s what people see, more than a simple room"

Excerpt from an article by Rosie Milard in the Sunday Times January 20th 2008

"JAMIE OLIVER'S former house, used for filming the Naked Chef programmes, is up for sale.
Since the Naked Chef the whole property has been re-vamped and extended to maximise the living space. The home now offers the best in-state-of-the-art living, including five plasma screens, one of which is a waterproof screen in the spa bathroom, fibre optic mood lighting, a gym, bespoke kitchen, integral garage and solar panels".
More.....

"Time? The big factor in having a bespoke kitchen is the time the factory takes to produce the bits. Allow eight weeks. Installation is very rapid - a couple of days.- "Comment from the BBC. Read the full article.