My Kitchen Needs a Kitchen

What’s a Back Kitchen and Why Has It Gotten so Popular?

‘A Kitchen for the Kitchen’

The back kitchen, in essence a pantry on overdrive, has become increasingly popular among wealthier homeowners in recent years, according to architects, designers and homebuilders. In May, about 30 eighth graders gathered around the large island in an Indianapolis kitchen to belt out “The sun’ll come out tomorrow” to celebrate a successful school production of “Annie.” About 60 parents cheered them on, spilling out onto the patio.

For Jayme Moss, the host who opened her home to the guests, the moment marked another milestone: not a single dirty plate, tray or bowl tarnished the photos or videos. The sizable mess that comes from serving pasta and cake to a crowd of 90 was hidden in her back kitchen, a smaller room tucked behind the main one.

“Normally you take that picture or video and there would be stuff all over the kitchen,” said Ms. Moss, 49. Instead, “everything was in the back.” Last year, Ms. Moss and her husband, Bradley Moss, finished renovating their 1929 French chateau-style home. Adjacent to their main kitchen — an open-concept space with fumed oak cabinets, a Viking stove and Calacatta countertops — they built a smaller one with a set of cabinets, a sink, an induction stove, an oven, an ice-maker and a convection microwave. The back kitchen, in essence a pantry on overdrive, has become increasingly popular in recent years, according to architects, designers and homebuilders. It’s particularly desirable in new construction where floor plans are as flexible as wish lists. But gut an existing home to the studs, or add an addition, like the Moss family did, and room for a second cooking space emerges. Back kitchens come with as many names as they do appliances: the dirty kitchen, the messy kitchen, the prep kitchen, the working kitchen and the scullery kitchen, to name a few. These auxiliary spaces reinvent the humble pantry as the hardworking engine of the house. With the dirty work happening offstage, the main kitchen can shine, an immaculate centerpiece to be marveled, not sullied by spaghetti sauce and sheet pans. “I like a place that, quite frankly, looks like it’s not lived in,” said Ms. Moss, a co-founder and board member of Versapay, a financial technology company. Mr. Moss, 49, is the president and chief executive of a medical testing lab in Indianapolis.

Their back kitchen is visible from their main one, with Art Deco brass and gold tiles peeking through an archway. In hindsight, Ms. Moss would like to see even less of it. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d like it to be where I couldn’t see it at all,” she said.

The ultrarich have long had their “Downton Abbey”-style chef kitchens, fully equipped industrial spaces, out of sight and the domain of caterers and personal cooks. But the back kitchen is not meant to replace the main kitchen. Nor is it the spare kitchen sometimes found in the basements of modest homes, used to roast Thanksgiving turkeys, make Sunday gravy or prepare Passover meals. It is instead an extension of the main kitchen, cropping up in new homes that cost from around $1 million to $5 million to build and in kitchen renovations with five- to six-figure budgets, according to builders and designers.

Emily Clark, who, with her husband, owns Clark & Co., a custom homebuilder in Idaho, has witnessed the evolution of the pantry over the past decade. As the open-concept kitchen evolved into an extension of the living room — with open shelves and windows replacing upper cabinets, and kitchen islands looking increasingly like dining furniture rather than working countertops — the pantry has been given an increasingly bigger role, too, reimagined as a well-appointed and highly stylized room for prepping, cooking and cleaning.

“Once you start expanding and adding the dishwasher, then it’s like, ‘Well, what if I put a baking center back there?’” Ms. Clark said. Cloistered away in a private work space, “I can prep my cookies and put them in the oven with all of the measuring cups and mixing bowls. And then I can bring my beautiful warm cookies out of the oven into my serving kitchen,” she said.

Amanda Lantz, an interior designer in Indiana, said that every one of her new construction projects included a back kitchen, a marked change from 2019 when none had one. She sees the coronavirus pandemic as a catalyst. “People were stocking up more. You were cooking more, you were using your kitchen more,” she said, referring to the height of the pandemic. “So then, when they’ve gone to build the next house, they’ve felt that they don’t have enough space.”

Homeowners want the pantry to look pretty, too. After all, home organizing has become a competitive sport — cue Khloe Kardashian’s backlit beige pantry, a shrine to packaged goods. The expectations are now high for a room that once housed brooms and large packages from Costco. “People want to walk in and shop their pantry,” Ms. Clark, the homebuilder, said.

While some people may have duplicate sets of cookware for both spaces, most tend to use the pantry for dedicated tasks, doubling up on only a few items, like spatulas. Maybe the induction stovetop in the back is the children’s domain, while the Viking gas one is for the parents, as is the case in the Moss household. Or perhaps the second refrigerator stores drinks and frozen goods while the one in the front is for fresh produce.

Butler’s pantries have a long history in kitchen design, popular in late 19th-century and early 20th-century homes, when the upper class used them as staging areas for staff and storage for fine china. But they faded from fashion in the postwar era. Now, as they make a supersize comeback, Tiffany Skilling, who designed the Moss family home and specializes in historic renovations, sees the moment as a nod to the stately homes of the past. This generation of homeowners may be coming around to the idea that separate rooms are not such a bad idea.

“I always tell everyone, break it up into different tasks,” she said.

Building two kitchens is not cheap. Costs vary depending on the quality of the finishes and appliances, generally ranging from $25,000 to $50,000, according to designers. Mr. and Ms. Moss spent around $300,000 on their main kitchen and about $60,000 on the back one.

In 2020, Holly and Craig VonDemfange built a $1.4 million house, designed by Clark & Co., near Boise, Idaho. Ms. VonDemfange estimates that the open-concept kitchen and pantry were the most expensive parts of the project. Their main kitchen, with white cabinets and a 12-foot-wide oven hood, is in the center of their 4,000-square-foot house. But the pantry, hidden behind a pocket door, is where a lot of the action happens.

“The kids pull out the air fryer and put a couple of tacos in there,” said Ms. VonDemfange, 47, a business lead at Meta. “It is as used, if not more,” as the big kitchen, she said. Mr. VonDemfange, 53, is the founder and chief executive of a virtual accounting and bookkeeping service.

Stuff enough gadgets and appliances into a second kitchen and, at some point, it cannibalizes the main one. Cathy Purple Cherry, the principal of Purple Cherry Architects, with offices in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, has seen this happen in the new homes she designs. If the induction stove is in the back and it’s easier to use than the gas one out front, at some point, you may start doing all the cooking back there. Ms. Cherry witnessed this when she had dinner at a client’s new house in Annapolis, Md. The host spent much of the evening out of sight in the back kitchen, cooking steaks, while Ms. Cherry waited for her to emerge.

“When you bring that stove element to the back, you have to watch out, because it can actually draw you away from the socialization that happens around the kitchen,” she said. To avoid that risk, Ms. Cherry discourages her clients from adding a cooktop to the back kitchen. But homeowners don’t always listen.

When Kelly Ladwig and Suzie Stolarz were designing their 4,300-square-foot house in Nashville, their architect was initially skeptical of the concept of a back kitchen. “He didn’t quite understand what we wanted to do,” Ms. Ladwig said. “His reaction was: ‘Well, it’s your house. Are you sure you don’t want to use this for something else?’ But then as we started designing it, he was like, ‘This is fabulous.’” They call the space the dirty kitchen and it houses a second oven, a second refrigerator and freezer, a microwave, a sink and a dishwasher.

In the year since the couple moved into the new house, the dirty kitchen has become a central fixture in their daily lives. In the mornings, Ms. Ladwig, 54, a real estate agent, makes coffee and feeds the two dogs in the back kitchen. The three cats eat their meals in the main kitchen. In the evenings, when Dr. Stolarz, 52, a dentist, comes home from work, she dumps her purse and the groceries in the back kitchen.

“It’s a kitchen for the kitchen,” said Ms. Ladwig, who estimates that together, the two kitchens accounted for about $400,000 of their $1.45 million building costs.

Pretentious fucking twats...it's called a pantry (just make it bigger)

Fucking assholes...do they know how to cook? Have lots of shelf space.

I've always thought that if I lived in a place with enough space and I had enough money, I'd have a main kitchen that was beautiful and a catering/private chef's kitchen that was setup to handle dinner parties and was designed for a professional chef to work in efficiently.

I mean, who wants to see the help do their jobs even in passing...

Eat the rich.

If the Help is HOTT! Yes. you want to watch them closely!!

WE all knew that "open concept" design was going to collapse and this is just the beginning of its SAD LAST DAYS!

End of days.

I'm all for shifting some kitchen tasks to a pantry, and have no objection at all if people prefer the look of a tidy, even spare and minimal kitchen. But to have a "show kitchen" and a "rear kitchen" because it frees up opportunities for Instagram photos in the mess-free latter, then fuck the idiots. And note how the Indianapolis woman and her family do everything in the back kitchen and only bring it out to serve in the show kitchen for photo and entertaining ops.

Catering kitchens make perfect sense for people who entertain at home often, the partner or executive who hosts parties for his or her staff, for the neighborhood association annual party, for the Restore the Opera House fundraiser, the Last Sunday of the Month Who's Who in Gay Buttfucking Brunch Society... Knock yourself out: a catering kitchen has different requirements than a home kitchen.

But these assholes are just idiots. Next they will be installing show toilets that always look perfect and unused and installing back toilets for the dirty business of everyday life. Show showers and, on the other side if the wall, scrubbing showers for actual cleaning. Bedrooms for show and separate bedrooms for sleeping.

Now available for show kitchens, and coming soon for show shitting rooms.

Wow, just when I thought it couldn't get worse with the wealthy being obnoxious, while the rest of us drown, they come up with this shit. Pretty sure a dining room was good enough for people back in the day to avoid hanging out in the kitchen.

I like '70s-style kitchens, which were somewhere in between open concept and a 4-walled kitchen. If you look at the floorplans for the pre-war NYC apartments, the kitchens are ridiculously discrete. The open concept kitchens (kitchen and living room separated by a counter / island are not great, either.

Anyone who has to have a "dirty kitchen" should be kicked in the cunt bone.

[quote] “I can prep my cookies and put them in the oven with all of the measuring cups and mixing bowls. And then I can bring my beautiful warm cookies out of the oven into my serving kitchen,” she said.

I imagine this happens about as often as a House Hunters frau peacefully drinking coffee in the morning on the balcony off the master bedroom.

You win Datalounge today R14

Possibly the internet

That is such an awesome (and true) response on so many levels.

Thank you!

I follow Ladwig on IG. I don’t really like the exterior of her house at all, but the inside is quite nice.

My kitchen needs a kitten with it's own little kitchen so as not to be underfoot.

My kitchen needs a kitchen where SOMEBODY CAN FUCK ME RIGHT NOW!

obvi none of u bitches entertain guests, living in mother's basement and all

making a saucy, perfect sunday gravy gives u no time 2 clean 4 guests right after, especially when they have 2 b served hot and fresh

I thought this was always called a catering kitchen

I think they used to have dining rooms for this purpose.

its called dining for a reason r21

u give house tour 2 the pretty kitchen, then gloss over past the brutal 1

Orthodox Jews have two kitchens. Something about certain foods not being able to touch each other.

I get not wanting the mess to be seen at parties. I just use my garage (off the kitchen) as a makeshift "catering" area to house platters of food ahead of serving, and dirty dishes/pots & pans, etc. after. When we entertain, I have two folding banquet tables and a small portable (extra) oven set up in there, plus another full sized fridge.

It is really nice when your guests hanging out in/around the kitchen don't have to look at all the pots/pans and dishes piling up. I also can't stand it when well meaning guests insist on spending an hour after the party helping with clean up. I'm usually exhausted and prefer to leave it all for the morning when I can take my time and clean up everything myself.

Excess, redundancy and waste. Trademarks of the rich.

So, the concept of a fancy living room up front where you entertain guests and a casual family room in the back for a sloppy family space has moved to the kitchen? Which proves there are no new ideas only re-imaged old ones

I'd rather have a kitchen in a separate building like of yore, and an old fashioned dining room.

My butler's pantry needs a butler's pantry. My scullery needs a scullery. My polishing room needs a polishing room. My brushing room needs a brushing room. My ironing room needs an ironing room. My larder needs a larder. My housekeeper's room needs a housekeeper's room. My silver vault needs a silver vault. My servants' hall needs a servant's hall.

^ The problem with a house like yours is if you want to change your mind you have to find the designated room for it

It's essentially a fancy pantry. Historically, pantries are workrooms, not storerooms, and this is just a trend to move back to that.

Carry on.

I thought I was fancy with my upstairs AND downstairs washer and dryers.

[quote]Orthodox Jews have two kitchens. Something about certain foods not being able to touch each other.

They have two sets of everything and may have two dishwashers, a divided sink, a double oven, etc., but two kitchens aren't necessary.

Mental note: add gift-wrapping room to gift-wrapping room.

^ That only makes sense. How else would you handle overflow wrapping?

^ Ha! Did Candy Spelling have a sewing room? My mother did

I'm going to add a torture chamber to my torture chamber. The front torture chamber will remain beautifully outfitted for traditional BDSM parties. The back torture chamber will be for really unpleasant stuff.

^ Do you mean?... Is that where you force guys to look at your baby pictures? 😳

R35, it was not a commonplace sewing room. I doubt CS could thread a bobbin.

It was a gift-wrapping room, though it wasn’t one; it was three. (See link.)

Apparently, she was ahead of the curve here.

Stories like this make me think how if I didn't have empathy for the animals I'd say maybe the planet should end.

^ Nah, not the whole planet, just idiot rich people

Not only kitchens, but these people drive $100K SUVs as well. Off with their heads

What a daft concept.

My pretentious sister (who, I will admit, does entertain alot) is currently building a house in Atlanta with a "catering kitchen." It's basically a larger butlers pantry with a refrigerator, dishwasher, range, and 2 addition ovens. The function is to allow the main kitchen, which is part of the living space via a open floorplan, to remain clean and hide the "workers" from guests view. It sort of makes sense and it's sort of ridiculous at the same time. Why not, you know, just put doors to close off the kitchen?

$300,000 for a fucking kitchen?! Hell, I didn't even pay that much for my co-op!

How much money to these moronic rich assholes earn, while homelessness runs amok in the US.

Anyone think it's extremely odd that such a liberal newspaper as the New York Times. constantly runs articles about shallow rich people and their superficial lives?

Their Sunday Real Estate section is mind boggling.

We need a return of the guillotine.

In my day, we called it the slave kitchen where Mammy cooked our vittles.

People really entertain that much in their kitchens? What happened to dining rooms?

The wealthy aren't paying enough taxes.

Eat the Rich!

We are currently in a revolution where the formerly middle class are ascending- so hanging out in the kitchen (barf) instead of the actual entertaining spaces- dining room, living room, parlor, library, etc - is considered "wealthy". It absolutely WAS NOT. But much like Trump became an American President, the US is shifting gears.

So live, laugh, learn to love this idiocy.

My next prediction: fancy trampolines. Middle class and working class people love gigantic trampolines.

[quote]We are currently in a revolution where the formerly middle class are ascending

Boy, you got that wrong, the middle class are descending. The rich are getting wealthier and the middle class are becoming poor.

Where have you been the last few years?

The idea of a kitchen as an empty granite palace is nuts. If a large kitchen is well-planned, it can have multiple stations for coffee, baking, food prep, grilling and so on. Housing and plugging-in appliances should not be an afterthought. I'm willing to bet anything that these nimrods don't cook or want the kids making grilled cheese in their stupid kitchens.

The Moss family home is listed for 1.5M. Ah, Indianapolis.,

I'm here to make the argument for having two kitchens, just not connected. When I refurbed my kitchen, I bought an inexpensive ($150) IKEA mini-kitchen with sink, and set it up with a cube fridge, induction hob and microwave in a utility area at the other end of the house, near my home office.

It's staying because it's so darn convenient for drinks, snacks, quick reheats and some light cooking. When your main kitchen is 100' away, it's a huge convenience.

[quote]We are currently in a revolution where the formerly middle class are ascending- so hanging out in the kitchen (barf) instead of the actual entertaining spaces- dining room, living room, parlor, library, etc - is considered "wealthy". It absolutely WAS NOT.

Whaaaaaat? Where have you been Rip Van Winkle @ R20. Open concept floor plans have been a thing since the 1980's. Long gone are the days when guests hung out in the living room while the host (usually wife/mom) slaved away preparing food in a closed off, separate kitchen---so, not able to enjoy the festivities.

[quote] Anyone think it's extremely odd that such a liberal newspaper as the New York Times. constantly runs articles about shallow rich people and their superficial lives?

Not at all. It's the working class, who aren't the paper's target market, who are most impacted by the negative outcomes of some liberal politics, most especially open borders and mass immigration. But the liberal middle class only think the poor don't support their politics because they're stupid.

[quote]I'm here to make the argument for having two kitchens, just not connected. When I refurbed my kitchen, I bought an inexpensive ($150) IKEA mini-kitchen with sink, and set it up with a cube fridge, induction hob and microwave in a utility area [100' away] at the other end of the house, near my home office.

Though it's quite a different thing, I think that's an underdeveloped idea, R54. The kitchen in a cupboard example at the link of a cupboard fitted out as a mini-kitchen is a form more popular in Europe (and, who knew, South Africa) than the U.S. These show up in tiny apartments and in holiday lets where, especially in a small space, a more or less attractive piece of furniture that usually closes up and contains a very compact and basic kitchen: sink, stove top, microwave, refrigerator, coffee maker, all small scale. These are sometimes good options for places used part-time; for tiny studio apartments where the resident may not want a refrigerator as the focal point of his space; by people on holiday who are not doing big meals; and for your example of a secondary kitchen far from the principal kitchen. I've know nmany people who have some form of what you describe when they live on a house with 3, 4, or more floors and maybe a roof terrace.

They are great for what they are, but it's very different than a fully equipped working kitchen to paint the wear and tear and dirty dishes away from the "show kitchen."

[quote]Where have you been the last few years?

In the kitchen. Duh.

A show kitchen for my guests to gather, and the modern equivalent of a slave cook shack far from us, where the browns and poors work.

I have five of them, in fact.

But, the best gossip is still whispered in very low voices in the dirty kitchen.

It’s funny- our standard of living in the United States peaked in 1973 and has declined dramatically since then yet since the 1990’s many houses in upper middle class towns have been torn down to make way for McMansions . People are living it up like never before even though our overall standard of living keeps dropping.

Uh, this is how immigrants to the US lived in my blue-collar coastal New England city in the 1970s and 1980s. There was the “good” kitchen on the main floor which was sparkling clean, and was used for making coffee and preparing light meals.

The REAL kitchen was in the basement, with a huge utility sink, fridge, chest freezer, beat-up stove. Here is where they slaughtered rabbits and chickens, canned vegetables, deep-fried food, made wine and beer and alcohol.