The vision was to gather 'round a table.
Last Saturday, we had our first talk-style event — one where people sit and listen — at the store since we renovated and shrunk the square footage of the by half. The smaller footprint is more focused and manageable, but poses a problem when gathering. Namely, where will the people go?
The answer, we would test, was two-fold. First, making events more intimate with fewer humans and more opportunities for connection and conversation. The second was, we hoped, to change the layout. Instead of putting panelists or speakers in front of a crowd, we’d all be around a table.
The focus of Saturdays talk was perfect for this, as we were talking about kitchens.
Kate Wood and Keira Ritter joined us to share passion and best practice when making an old house kitchen work for lives today, and when making new house kitchens feel grounded in history. Kitchens, though, pose a unique problem. When we say “old house” we are normally talking about the late 18th through the mid-20th century, and kitchens during that time period were not for gathering or togetherness. A kitchen was a private space, and one did not walk into a person’s home and head to the kitchen. To do so would be extremely rude. They were a working space, not a social space.
Today, the kitchen is where people gather. When someone says that they need a bigger kitchen, it is far more often because they want to pack more friends into it than that the current dimensions don’t fit their pastry aspirations.
Turning a kitchen from the past, a place of focused work and private repose, into a space for gaiety and gathering is extremely difficult without destroying the historic fabric of a home and what Kate and Keira collaborate on so masterfully.
Leading the conversation between Keira and Kate was a load of fun, but guiding great thinkers and doers through a conversation also offers the opportunity to notice what I myself am fixating on or processing. I learn what I care about through asking others what drives them.
This lead us to one of the enduring images of the evening, the hearth. There is this great book, Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America, 1640-1830 by John R. Stevens (2005, get it), that I frequently circle back to because of one section in particular. In it, Stevens focuses on the movement of the hearth from the center of the room (often the only room of the house) in the 17th century to the periphery. This also meant the creation of chimneys and fireplaces in Dutch homes along the Hudson and marked a significant shift in the role fire played in a home. Instead of something you would gather around, it became something one sits in front of. This pushed the work done by fire (washing, cooking, etc), too to the periphery. It was easy, then, to box it into its own room that was a dedicated space for just those people who did such work. And so the modern kitchen was (over the next few hundred years) born. This was happening simultaneously in different geographic areas, but with much the same result.
As the kitchen has one again become the meeting place of the home, as the ‘cook’ of the family wants to be part of the conversation and to not always have their back to guests, we have shifted back to something more like the 17th century and earlier hearths of old. The kitchen isn’t simply a place to prepare food anymore, but a place to gather ‘round a fire — albeit a metaphorical one.
There is a beauty in this that brought me to a pause when in conversation with Kate and Keira. At a moment when people are struggling with disconnection and distraction, there is something in how we are choosing to live (when we have the luck to be able to choose) that pulls us back together.
Now, if only we could put our phones down.