Terence Conran, The Kitchen Book
Nearly fifty years old and still the clearest book on the kitchen — Terence Conran's 1977 classic argues, as this issue does, that a kitchen is judged by how it is used, not how it photographs.
The best book we know on the kitchen is nearly fifty years old, and it opens not with a colour scheme but with a fire. Terence Conran's The Kitchen Book, first published in 1977, still says almost everything this issue has been trying to say — that a kitchen is judged by how it is used, not how it photographs.
The book
Conran — the designer who founded Habitat and, more than anyone, taught post-war Britain how to furnish a home — followed his runaway bestseller The House Book with a single room. The Kitchen Book runs to some 360 large-format pages, published by Crown in New York, and treats the kitchen as what Conran plainly calls the heart of the home: not only a workroom and a cooking area, but the place where you entertain, where the children play, and the room that therefore deserves your greatest consideration.
Its chapters give away the whole attitude. "Cave to Microwave" walks the long history of cooking; "Planning Your Kitchen" and "Problem Kitchens" get practical about layout and awkward spaces; "Kitchens of Character" and "Batterie de Cuisine" cover the personality of a room and the tools that fill it. Between them sit page after page of real kitchens — professional and domestic, grand and tiny — photographed as places people actually cook in, not as showrooms.
Why it still holds
What dates the book is only its appliances. Everything underneath is exactly what we have been arguing across these pages: begin with how the household lives, plan around real movement and real storage, and let character come from use rather than decoration. Conran is credited with popularising the idea of the "unfitted kitchen" — a room assembled from pieces that suit the cook, rather than a wall of identical units — which is simply the storage-by-frequency argument this issue keeps returning to, made forty years early.
Read it beside anything published this season and the modern book will have better photographs and worse ideas. Conran's remains the rare kitchen book that is about the people in the kitchen.
Nearly fifty years on, the best book on the kitchen is still the one that starts with the cook and ends with the room — not the other way round.