It doesn't have to be big, just smart

People sometimes think that a good kitchen design means restaurant style stoves, huge refrigerators, or granite counters.

But there is a much more important feature which every well designed kitchen has to have. That is a food prep area, 30” to 48” wide, that is but a step or two away from the sink, and but a step or two at most to the cooktop. The spatial relationship is essential.

This work area will have a counter at the right height, and usually a set of drawers below, where the most-used gear is stored. Often above this counter will be convenient storage for the most-used ingredients: salt, pepper, oil, and so on.

If your kitchen has this, it can be a pleasure to work in, large or small. If not, no granite tops or restaurant style stoves will make it an efficient workplace. When I design kitchens, I start here.

I see a lot of kitchens, including new, expensive ones, that don't have this. Often the stove and sink are jammed close together, and the work counters are somewhere else, out in the wings of the layout. Sometimes this happens because people believe that the stove has to be on the outside wall (to have a hood), and that the sink has to be under a window. Neither of these things are true. I say, get the layout right, move a window if that's called for, and get the new stove, or new floor, later.

If you have this well organized food prep area, you have a pretty good kitchen. If you have a second prep area (also handy to the stove) and a “well organized cleanup-and-dish-storage center” at the sink, you are on your way to a great kitchen, that will be a pleasure to work in.

The Origin Story: How SCD Started

I've been a builder since about 1970, mostly working in small partnerships and coop building outfits located in Cambridge, Mass, and in Central Vermont. We always had as shop of some sort, and always did quite a bit of kitchen work.

In the early 80's, I wrote a kitchen book called “The Motion-Minded Kitchen”. I spent a lot of time in the Boston Public Library researching the history of the kitchen. My favorite discovery was the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. In the 1920s they developed something called Motion Study, which was a very powerful way of looking at any kind of work setting. After his death, Lillian applied these ideas to the home, and specifically to kitchen design and the work we do in our kitchens.

Most of the basic ideas of kitchen design concepts we use today go back to Motion Study, including the fundamental ideas of work centers, food flow, “storage at point of first use”, and “one-motion storage”. In the early '50s, a huge research project at Cornell, known as the Cornell Kitchen Study, took this work further. These ur-texts are the basis of good kitchen design, and also of ergonomic design and accessible design.

When I was about 60, I was ready to stop being a working carpenter and General Contractor. I wasn't that good up on the ladder any more, and there were younger people who were much stronger. Also, being a GC is very stressful. I think the term 24/7 was originally a term to describe the GC's workday.

I decided it might be interesting to build a new business from scratch, a small shop building kitchens based on what I had learned over the years, including all the concepts I learned back in the Boston Public Library.

It would be fun to use these ideas in the design of kitchens, but I'd been doing that already. What was really exciting was the idea of applying the same concepts to the design and operation of the shop itself. It's always great fun to set up a shop, and I've done it many times. But it might be really thrilling to design a shop from scratch, exactly laid out and equipped for this one primary purpose. And so it proved to be.

A kitchen functions a lot like a woodshop. In one case, say, you are taking a one-pound slab of salmon from the fridge, cutting it to size, spicing it up, making a drizzle for it, cooking it just so, placing it artfully on a nice looking plate, and serving it. You want to move your piece of salmon about and through your kitchen in the best and most convenient way. In the woodshop, you are taking a forty pound slab of plywood, cutting it to size, and so on - you get the idea. You want to do it in the best and most convenient way. The storage, cutting, spicing, and finishing, and plating problems are much the same, but the stuff is heavier. You still have to put the work centers in the right order, store things in the perfect place, work at a comfortable height, and clean up afterwords.

What would it be like to design a shop perfectly suited to building kitchens, and at the same time, refine our design to make it better, more flexible, and easier to build? Maybe through such efficiencies, we could make our work a bit more affordable, and maybe even make a little extra income for ourselves. Wouldn't that be fun.

Around this time I encountered another set of ideas that was just as important and interesting as “Motion Study.” That was the idea of Lean Engineering, also known as The Toyota Manufacturing System. The most well-known idea from Lean Engineering is that of “just-in-time delivery”. That means you don't inventory a lot of parts or supplies, you make your suppliers bring them just as you need them. Similarly, you don't inventory the things you make and then wait for someone to buy them. When you have an order, you make it up, and send it out the door, almost in one continuous motion. This saves space, but it also saves an enormous amount of work, specifically the work involved in handling your building materials at the beginning of the project, and storing and handling your product after building it.

Another “Lean” concept that is particularly relevant to the woodworker (particularly one without huge funds or huge ambitions) is to design your shop to be very adaptable. Instead of huge, expensive machines that do one operation efficiently, you have a lot of small machines that can do a variety of things, that you can move around as needed, based on the work in hand. Another key idea is “one piece flow”. Rather than, for example, making all the dovetails for all the drawers for all the cabinets, then set them aside to assemble later, you might instead make and install a single set of drawers completely. Saves work minimizes moving stuff around the shop endlessly. Most important, you catch errors early, and can adjust as needed. It leads you closer to “error free” building. Like my Toyota truck.

So, seven years ago, armed with these two powerful and (frankly) inspirational sets of ideas, we built a small but wonderful shop, all on one floor, with a nice loading dock almost exactly the height of the bed of my truck, with a few big table saws and lots of small tools that are always set up to do the many tasks that go into building our cabinets. We have a fleet of rolling carts to help us move stuff, various vacuums to suck the dust and fumes away. The paint store is two minutes away, the lumber yard ten.

Building this, and setting up this little business had been mostly fun and always interesting. My personal hope is that as I get older, the good design invested in the shop will make it possible for me to work as long and as much as I want, with less physical strain, good light, and good safety.

Another reason I wanted to start this business was to work with Ian Maas. I met Ian when I was working and teaching at Goddard College. We worked together on projects there, and later at Iron Bridge Woodworkers. It's been fun collaborating with him for the past seven years, applying the ideas above, and slowly improving our ways of working and the kitchens we are building.