Kitchen talk with Johnny Grey

What the master designer has to say about design, ergonomics and innovation...

Designer Johnny Grey is known for his unconventional kitchens. He made his name with the concept of the unfitted kitchen, in which freestanding furniture is the norm and sharp edges and corners are absent. He sees kitchens as beautiful spaces for the enjoyment of food and family. Grey shares his philosophy on kitchen design.
Making people happy

I'm much more interested in making people happy and comfortable than I am in putting up a great big wall and a great big stove that can hold fifteen pots at the same time. That's not really important. The core ideas are what are really important: do you provide people with a comfortable living space where they feel really good? How do you, as an interior designer or architect, make people feel really good?

The answer is simple — to make people feel good you have to make them happy. The biggest group of people at the ISH 2007 in Dubai are the lighting people — there are 18 people here to talk from all around the world. And they all say, that to get light right (and new research in neuroscience confirms) we need to understand the effect of light on the body. Similarly, we need to understand the effect of design on the human body too. And though you may barely notice it, design really does have a visceral effect.

The most obvious example I can give you is, if you're prepping for cooking, and are facing against a wall with a cupboard three inches from your nose, how is that going to make it enjoyable to be in the kitchen? Why would you want to stay there? And for the person who's doing the task, it turns it into a dull task. Reverse them round 90 degrees, put them at an island or peninsula with friends and family sitting within their direct line of sight and you've got a different experience that works for them. So, that's the first point. You need to position people so they've got eye contact.

The second thing to keep in mind is contact with a long view. If you want to make people comfortable, give them a long view — either through a window or into a garden.

Then, give them a sense of where the immediate threat is coming from. You want to give people sight of the entrance into the room. So a lot of the initial planning should largely be about sight lines.

There's an underlying theory about what human beings' instincts are.

It's what neuroscientists call their 'hard wiring'. Yes, there are specific things that will make people happy. For instance, you measure a counter-top height from someone's flexed elbow and not from their eyes, because people's flexed elbows vary a lot in height. People's upper arms vary a lot. You want variable work surfaces because nearly always, you'll find that husbands and wives will not have the same flexed elbow height.

You also need to watch for the counter length. Especially in America, people have the tendency to overdo long countertops. If you start to do that, you can't put a sofa in, so you can't make it a comfortable room. In our designs, we've developed this concept of 'dedicated work areas', which basically makes a work area as small and as organised as possible. It's all about a sense of order. The working triangle is a very limited and out of date concept, so in terms of designing technically, you can kiss that goodbye.

A sense of place

The truth is that design is far more interesting and complex and there are many more things to consider in a kitchen than where you cook, where you wash up and where you prep. Of course, it's important to get that right too, but there are about ten different things you need to get right to design a kitchen well.

I have this stance that I call 'humane ergonomics' and as far as I am concerned, ergonomics is extremely important. I'm more interested in ergonomics as a bigger conceptual picture. So for example, if you have certain areas at certain heights, so you tend to do very specific tasks at those points. Certain material like stone or stainless steel — hardwearing materials — you take for granted around the cooking area. Where it gets really interesting is, how do you sequence that in relation to say which window does it go near? Can you open up the French doors onto a balcony or a patio?

When you close your eyes and imagine your dream kitchen, it's not about cabinetry. It's often about a sense of place. I get people to do this in a lot of my talks and they never mention a floor plan and they never mention the furniture; if they do, it's always in passing.

The vision is always about the bigger things — has it got a view? Has it got a table by the window? Is there a fireplace? What it comes down to is that most people want to be able to be in the kitchen with their families and to be able to enjoy spending time there and their memories are often to do with the kitchen table and the conversations around it rather than the kind of refrigerator they had.

Go with the flow

I think the modern kitchen is a terrible monotony. We have a particular dislike of high-level cupboards above the counter-top, because you always bash your face against them and they always interrupt your eye-line when you're trying to do something on the countertop. We try to keep high-level cupboards to a minimum.

Out of sight is out of mind. People put a lot of things into cupboards — especially at the backs of cupboards — and ever use them. So one of the early tests we used to do on kitchens is whether a partially blinded person could find their way around a kitchen. To have different materials through the kitchen, helps develop some kind of sense of memory that links you to where things are.

When we use these different materials they all have a story or a functional element behind them. It's like our idea of soft geometry — it's not about making pretty curves initially. It might look pretty afterwards, but the purpose of using the curves is that the body doesn't move round in straight lines and the way your vision works is that you use very little energy when you're looking straight ahead.

If you have things coming out sideways, activating your peripheral vision, it actually activates your amygdala, which is the instinctive part of the brain. This immediately puts you into an alert situation and you stop concentrating on what you're doing. Now, even in the most minor, subliminal kind of way, sharp corners on an island tend to do that when you walk around a kitchen. If instead, you have curved edges on the central piece, you find that you flow around the kitchen more easily.