Young Man in Search of a Dish Drainer

In 1967, I bought 20 acres of land on a muddy back road in Plainfield Vermont for $1,000, and built a little house on it with my first wife, Peggy Clark. The house was 16 feet by 20, plus a little sleeping loft, and somehow we managed to get a sitting area, dining table, and a bit of a kitchen into that space. We had running water, but no electricity at first.

Peggy had the idea of building a set of slotted shelves above the sink for all our dishes. The idea was you would wash and rinse the dishes, then put them away wet on the dishrack, and the little bit of remaining water would drip down into the sink. The dishes would be stored there, too. For some reason, we started calling this contraption a “wonder no-dry”.

It made dishwashing easy. It eliminated maybe a third of the work by cutting out the “drying the dishes” part. Then it eliminated maybe another third by cutting out the “putting dishes away” part. Because the wonder no-dry was right at the sink, it also saved a lot of walking about during cleanup.

It was space-saving, too , important in a tiny house. In most kitchens, you have the place where you drain dishes, the place you store them, and usually also a dishwasher, really three stations for the same dishes. We had just one.

Since then, I have built a great number of dishdrainers, in my own dwellings, in various communal houses, but mostly for customers of the various woodworking businesses I've been involved in. Some of these folks also had dishwashers, and some didn't.

I love the idea that Peggy thought this idea up, but in fact I've since seen similar contraptions in pictures of Scaninavian homes, in various youth hostels, and once in a Medieval castle in Wales.

The wonder no-dry is a great little metaphor for how I like to think about design.

A lot of design in general and kitchen design in particular is about show, style, fashion, and marketing. Bigger, more complicated, and more expensive is better. If a person an do something, a machine can probably do it better.

The dishdrainer goes the opposite way, toward simplification and economy, understanding various work processes, and designing the kitchen to make them easier and simpler.

I like designing this way. For a designer, it's more interesting to think about function, about how particular people want do do things, than it is to think about “products” and “features”. If we're on the beam, sometimes we get a more interesting and maybe even beautiful result than if we had take a more conventional approach.

Dish drainer defined: slotted shelves that drain back into the sink