When Jan O’Brien redesigned the kitchen of her newly purchased Foothills home, she took a page from what has been a standard in modern bathrooms.
She and her husband, Mike, each got their own cook top in the new, luxury kitchen where they can work their craft side-by-side, not unlike the two-sink bathroom where couples have long been able to make an area their own.
“My husband and I both cook so I chose to do two separate, two-burner cook tops that I spread apart so we could both stand there at the same time and work together,” O’Brien said. “We had that at our old house and it was just a great thing.”
O’Brien’s kitchen and the entire home will be on display for anyone interested during Desert Dwelling Design Week 2016, a three-day event March 4-6 put on by the Arizona South Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers. The event is open to the public. There are admission charges to various sessions.
The tour and panel discussion at O’Brien’s home will be March 5.
O’Brien designs kitchens and baths as a business, so when it came time to do her own during a full remodel of her home, she had a pretty good idea what she wanted, what was available and where it all needed to go.
“When I design anyone’s kitchen I always put myself in the middle of it and I visualize how it will function, where I will put things, how it will look,” she said, adding that in her kitchen she went for “a lot of counter space, a lot of storage. I was really anxious for state-of-the-art appliances and I got it all.”
Jessica Herring, general manager at Monark Premium Appliance Co., 3850 W. Orange Grove Road, will lead the March 6 discussion on luxury kitchens. She said decisions in kitchen redesigns, in particular those going for the full-on luxury kitchen, revolve around cooking and all that goes with it.
“People are very interested in the cooking,” Herring said. “It seems that the dishwasher and refrigerator purchases are both very emotional purchases. The refrigerator is one of most touched things in the home so people spend a lot of time dissecting what’s important in a refrigerator.
“But the thing that’s driving (customers’) kitchens is the cooking. How do you want to cook? What’s new in the market that you can cook with?”
Lately, O’Brien said, that means cooking with gas.
O’Brien chose gas for the burners in her kitchen after a period of popularity for the smooth-surface cook top. She said there were a number of issues that developed with those over time, including discoloration, scratches, and the fact that to cook efficiently on them, cooks needed to have flat-bottom pans.
“Not all pans have flat bottoms,” she pointed out.
O’Brien’s setup is four standard burners: two large ones and two smaller ones. But she said there are choices of modules that allow a cook to have whatever he or she needs.
“You can purchase an induction electric module. You can purchase a wok burner,” she said. “You can purchase a grill. There’s also a built-in steamer for the counter top. It really personalizes your selections and your choices.”
Like so much else in this generation, technology advances have revolutionized the kitchen to the point that computers and apps within various appliances do much of the thinking and take much of the guesswork out of cooking.
“Even if you’re not a good cook there are products out there that can help you be a good cook,” Herring said. “A lot of appliances are computerized now.
“If you want to make a chicken, the oven walks you through it. What kind of chicken are you cooking? How many pieces of chicken are you cooking? How do you want that to come out? You can pre-program that and the oven is basically going to do it for you. Even regular everyday appliances have apps.”
And predictably, the new technology is threatening old technology.
The convection steam oven — price tag $2,400 to $5,000, according to Herring — is driving the microwave oven toward the same retirement home as the rotary phone. O’Brien has one in her new kitchen — “our favorite appliance,” she said.
It heats quickly but unlike the microwave oven, what it heats does not dry out. It’s a technology that has long been in restaurants but has only been introduced to the residential market in the last three years or so, O’Brien said.
“My clients who have purchased this are absolutely wild about it,” she said. “You can steam vegetables and they retain 100 percent of their nutrients. When you’re heating leftovers, it tastes like you just made the stuff.”
In O’Brien’s kitchen, the steam oven is the appliance above the oven where the microwave has been a staple for years. And her microwave? It’s a $59 cheapy tucked away in a cabinet in a corner.
“It’s not an appliance that anyone was ever really comfortable cooking with,” she said. “It’s taking a back seat to our steam oven. A microwave kind of makes a leftover come out like a piece of tire tread. And the steam oven is like it was freshly baked.”
Another appliance that O’Brien predicts is headed for the wayside, at least in luxury kitchens, is the one-piece refrigerator/freezer. O’Brien’s kitchen features a built-in refrigerator next to the ovens. When the door is opened, it reveals a refrigerator that goes all the way to the floor. The freezer is a separate, built-in unit around the corner of the kitchen.
“When you talk about luxury kitchens you’re normally talking about built-in appliances,” she said. “The future of built-in refrigeration is that they will all be separate modules. You no longer buy a one-piece refrigerator/freezer.”
In the end, O’Brien said, building a functional luxury kitchen is about convenience and making the investment. For example, in her kitchen the dishwasher is across the aisle from the sturdy drawer where she keeps her dishes. Moving the dishes from the washer to the drawer is a reach and a hip turn instead of bending over to grab the dishes then standing up to put them in an upper cabinet.
“People want more convenience,” O’Brien said. “They want more room for multiple cooks. They want a variety of counter heights for those multiple cooks.
“It’s very much a living space. My husband is the cook in the family, bless his heart. He’s very happy in here. ”
