That’s because many mid-century kitchens were designed with a single cook in mind, not today’s modern households. This week’s episode is all about how to rethink and update your mid-century kitchen floor plan so it better fits your life.
If your kitchen layout feels awkward, you can blame the 1950’s patriarchy. It just wasn’t designed for multiple cooks, entertaining, or modern appliances.
So, how can you start thinking about a better floor plan?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Let’s fix your Mid-Century Kitchen Floor plan!
How do you plan for a more egalitarian kitchen – one that let’s more than one adult work on food prep at the same time?
First, move beyond the kitchen triangle.
For decades, kitchen design revolved around the idea of a work triangle—a perfect three-point path between the stove, sink, and fridge. But modern kitchens are used for more than just cooking!
And the concept of the work triangle is based on ONLY ONE PERSON moving efficiently between those three locations. When another person gets into that triangle there are bound to be some collisions.
Consider making zones for the things you do in your kitchen
Instead of focusing on a strict triangle, I like to think in kitchen work zones:
- Prep Zone: A counter space with easy access to knives, cutting boards, and ingredients.
- Cooking Zone: The stove and oven, plus nearby storage for pots, pans, and utensils.
- Cleanup Zone: The sink, dishwasher, and trash/recycling bins.
- Serving & Gathering Zone: An island or table where people can sit and chat while meals are being made.
Next, add a flexible work surface.
Many mid-century kitchens are galley-style, meaning they weren’t originally designed for islands. If you have room, consider adding a freestanding island to create better flow. Even a small rolling butcher block can make a huge difference in preventing traffic jams and giving you extra workspace.
For small kitchens, a peninsula (attached to one wall) can be a great alternative to a full island. It keeps the open feel of a mid-century space while giving you extra seating, storage, or counter space.
Yes, you should personalize your kitchen layout
Your kitchen should reflect how you use it. If you love to bake, dedicate a space for rolling dough and storing mixers. If you rarely use your oven, don’t make it the central focal point of your kitchen.
Think about the everyday tasks you do and design around them.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Where do you usually prep food?
- Do you entertain often?
- Are there areas in your kitchen that feel cramped or underused?
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why you should move beyond the kitchen triangle.
- How thinking in zones can help improve your layout.
- When to customize your layout to your specific patterns.
Listen Now On
Quick design tip…asymmetry
Asymmetry, in a nutshell, is all about balance rather than matching.
Mid-century houses show off their design chops – their jauntiness their specialness – with well balanced asymmetry. And even a basic mid-century builder-grade ranch like the one I live in can still have fun design features that come from the way its spaces are organized horizontally and asymmetrically.
Asymmetry makes your life easy. You don’t have to worry about matching your addition to other side of the house. As long as it is scaled and weighted to work with your home, you can put it where you need it. Likewise, when you’re decorating inside your house, you don’t need to have to have every element aligned outwards and in rows. You can combine one big image or object with two smaller images or objects on the same wall. Instead of trying to force artificially matching designs on your life, you can lean in to differences. Mid-century design choices can be playful, flexible and fun.
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
The Kitchen Desk
Remember those charming little desks built into mid-century kitchens? Originally designed as a spot for managing household paperwork, calendars, and recipe cards, they’re a nostalgic nod to a time when home management was a full-time job.
While many of these desks have disappeared in modern renovations, they can still be incredibly functional. Use one as a charging station, a homework nook, or even a mini workspace for casual tasks. Love them or hate them, kitchen desks are a quintessential feature of mid-century homes worth reconsidering.
Resources to improve your mid-century kitchen floorplan
- My next MCM Kitchen Clinic is happening this Saturday – join me!
- Get the Cornerstones of Mid-Century Design.
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
How many people fit into your kitchen? I don’t mean standing room only, although at a party, that can be an issue. I mean, is there room in your kitchen for everyone in your household who wants to do a kitchen task or hang out with someone who’s doing a task to exist? Can you and your partner both work in there at the same time without constantly hip checking each other? How does your mid-century kitchen floor plan actually work for your life? This is something I spent a lot of time thinking about, and so here we go.
Della Hansmann
Today’s episode is going to be all about the spatial relationships of your kitchen and how to improve them, either with a little bit of rethinking and maybe a piece of freestanding furniture, or when we need to pull out the big guns and think about an entirely new floor plan. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2005.
Della Hansmann
Before we get into our topic, I wanted to let you know that I’ve started a new endeavor, which is a YouTube channel. I am so excited about this. Actually, I should say I have not started a YouTube channel. I have restarted a mid mod Midwest YouTube channel. I made one video back in 2019 that is so embarrassing, so poorly lit, so weirdly cut, so oddly infused with a weird little soundtrack, that I had to take it down when I realized that it was still up there. But I have been really excited about the idea that podcasts last forever.
Della Hansmann
This is great, but a lot of the other content that I make, a lot of the other advice that I give is on Instagram, which is so fun. If you follow me on Instagram, I love the interactions that I get to have with people. There. I get DMS people’s questions about their houses all the time. A lot of my favorite clients have found us through a friend of theirs followed me on Instagram and had some fun, picking up some messages and recommended me to them when they realized they realized they were remodeling a mid-century house.
Della Hansmann
But the ideas that I put there, the videos that I make, the Instagram Stories, which last only 24 hours, but even the other carousels, the graphics, the other things like that, they’re so ephemeral, they get buried in the feed. I post them again sometimes, when I feel like this is something I really, really want to say. I want people to know which, if you followed me for a long time, you might see an idea or an image or video repeat, but I wanted to put some of the advice that I have about great mid-century houses somewhere that it can last and it can be more searchable.
Della Hansmann
So that leads me to YouTube. If you are the kind of person who likes YouTube, who likes to learn from video content, I’d love to meet you over there. Let me know what you would like to see added to that channel. First, it’s got, I think, right now, two videos on it more to come, but let me know what topics that I’ve already covered on the podcast would be fun as a video, or if you want to be more generous to the world, what do you think would be helpful to someone who is brand new to the concept of mid-century, who is just realizing, Oh, wow, is my house mid-century? What should I do about that? What would be the best things for me to put there for that person? I’d love your advice.
Della Hansmann
Shoot me a DM on Instagram, send me an email comment on a YouTube video one of the two that are there, and let me know what you think about that. Okay, the first two videos that are up and the next few I’m planning to do will be about kitchens. They are about kitchens. This is because kitchens are the topic of the moment. The other thing that’s on my mind right now is the mid-century kitchen clinic, which I’m delivering live on Saturday at 11am Central.
Della Hansmann
This is one of my favorite parts of the annual cycle that I have created in this business. And I wish I could basically deliver the mid-century kitchen clinic constantly. Do it a couple of times a month even. But it does take a lot of effort to organize, to run the back end logistics for it to let people know that it’s happening. And then, you know, to work through a whole basically it takes my energy of a Saturday. So to do it right, I can only do it once a year. If you are in any way curious about the mid-century kitchen clinic, I hope you’re going to show up. It is such a fun event to see other people having the same issues, slightly different ones, at a different place on the journey, exactly in your situation. It really builds a sense of like we are a Mid Mod ReMod Squad. We are a community of people who love and are working on improving our mid-century homes.
Della Hansmann
So if you’re listening to this episode after the week that it aired, you’ve missed the clinic. Bummer, but you can always watch the recording. You can always purchase the mid-century kitchen clinic replay and watch it asynchronously. That’s a really fun way to do it. You can pause. You can do it on your own time. But if you’re listening live and you’re curious about making changes to your kitchen, I hope you’ll show up. There is such a power to an energy to attending a live event. It’s not quite as fun as everyone being in the room together and getting to, like, walk around and look at your floor plans and workshop them over your shoulder like a teacher.
Della Hansmann
But people will be coming in for this from all over the country to join in this live event. And it’s so powerful to just say, I’m coming. I’m gonna take action. I’m gonna spend two hours, two plus hours, with a Q and A at the end of this Saturday, focused on my house, thinking about what it takes to make it good, what I could do to make it better and catalyze myself into action.
Della Hansmann
For a lot of people at past clinics, they have gotten back in touch with me and shared the work that they’ve taken on in their kitchen I should mention that also a large proportion of people who attend the mid-century kitchen clinic are also curious about the ready to remodel program. This is my wider learn how to plan a mid-century master plan for your own home process. It has the guides, the workbooks, the lessons, the examples, everything I’ve learned in my own custom business, basically encapsulated so you can follow the steps for yourself, plus you get access to the community of mid mod or Mod Squad, and the once a month Office Hours calls with me. It’s really fun.
Della Hansmann
And so because there’s such a strong crossover of people who show up for the midget century kitchen clinic, for all the topic clinics, and who are curious about ready to remodel, I do offer a limited time discount to joining the ready to remodel program. It’s fairly significant. So if you’re curious about that, come to the mid-century kitchen clinic on Saturday. It’s gonna be amazing.
Della Hansmann
All right, that’s enough about that. I will see you there. If you’re already enrolled, I’m so excited to have you as part of our clinic squad. Okay, free resource. Before we get into our main topic as well, let’s talk about let’s pull back to the bigger picture of good mid-century orient design. In this episode, I’m going to be talking about kitchen layouts, the mid-century kitchen floor plan that will work best for you, and that advice is going to be about mid-century houses, because everything I say about mid-century houses, but it’s also about good kitchen design in general.
Della Hansmann
For a lot of people, stress that they worry that they need to perfectly match everything, like, if you’re going to put, for an example, a kitchen range in your kitchen, and you want to have a window on one side of it, do you need to cut a window into the other side? Does it need to be symmetrically framed? A lot of the Pinterest pretty examples you see of remodeled kitchens have symmetrical cabinet layouts.
Della Hansmann
When we’re thinking about mid-century house design, one of the cornerstones of good mid mod updates, of putting mid-century ideas into your house, either keeping them or reinfusing them into a house is asymmetry. Asymmetry is a Get Out of Jail Free card, too.
Della Hansmann
Remembering to lean into asymmetry is going to free you from that kind of stress. Mid-century design is all about balance, and unlike previous eras, when an impressive home showed off its classiness, starting at the front door, with a front door flanked by as many paired elements as possible, light fixtures, windows, shutters, decorative details.
Della Hansmann
Mid-century is about things being off center but balanced, and this is going to make your life easy. Instead of trying to force artificially book matched designs onto your home, you can play up its asymmetrical features, and it leads to more natural livable shapes for the items in your life. When you do find something that’s overly symmetrical in your house already, or in your design plans, break it up, let your design choices be playful, flexible, livable.
Della Hansmann
So this works in the floor plan as well as in decorative items. This is true for how you arrange art on the wall and decor items. It’s true for how you arrange built ins or shelving or wall materials. It’s true for how you cut in new windows, how you wrap a deck around the corner of the house, and it’s absolutely true for your mid-century kitchen floor plan.
Della Hansmann
So highlight asymmetry in your house, both in two dimensional spaces as you look at a wall and in your mid-century kitchen floor plan, if you’re looking for more advice on sort of the philosophy, the visual style of a good mid-century update, I hope you have already grabbed if you have not get my mid mod update, design cornerstones, these four concepts are going to anchor the way that the choices you make throughout your remodel feel appropriate to the era of the house.
Della Hansmann
And they are in short thinking and focusing on asymmetry, both in wall layouts and in floor plans, making the most of the right kind of simple mid-century shapes, choosing the right mix of high low materials in the mid-century language and generating flow in and between spaces.
Della Hansmann
So grab that guide at mid mod midwest.com/cornerstones or get it from the show notes page, which will also have links to the mid-century kitchen clinic and some photos or some sketches that are relevant to the episode, and the transcript of the entire episode, you’ll find that, of course, at mid mod midwest.com/2005
Della Hansmann
if you struggle with having enough space to store things, but particularly with have enough space to work and to hang out in your kitchen. It might be a problem with the mid-century kitchen floor plan in general. The way that we think about a floor plan is often secondary to the way that the space looks. It’s so common in a remodel to just sort of. Out the pieces that are there and put them back exactly as they are.
Della Hansmann
And this is why I see again and again in houses that have been flipped or remodeled in the 80s or 90s, that the floor plan, the mid-century kitchen floor plan, is exactly intact from what it was, and yet it doesn’t look mid-century anymore. So it’s really the worst of both worlds.
Della Hansmann
It’s got all of the problems, the sort of built in patriarchy, the single cook kitchen, the isolation of a classic mid-century kitchen floor plan, and none of the benefits of the pretty materials and the original solid cabinets and all of the sort of hard wearing original appliances and everything that you could have if you had a time capsule kitchen, if that was your goal.
Della Hansmann
Fundamentally, a mid-century kitchen floor plan has some flaws. The kitchen this in this era were fundamentally designed for one cook. It was meant to be a housewife. She was meant to be working alone in a sort of a practical, efficient workspace. This wasn’t necessarily a big, nefarious plan.
Della Hansmann
A lot of the kitchen design concepts that were happening the mid-century kitchen floor plan was created to minimize her steps, to maximize her efficiency, to let her work quickly, and sort of apply factory assembly line principles to the process of being in a kitchen and food preparation. But there was no accounting for multiple people being involved in that process, husband and wife team, for example, and there was no accounting, really, with just sort of silly for socializing, keeping an eye on kids.
Della Hansmann
Beyond being able to sort of look out a kitchen window and see the view outside the window, whether that was the street side or the backyard, there wasn’t really a sense that the kitchen should communicate with the rest of the house. So when we think about planning a remodel for a mid-century kitchen, I am always thinking about modifying that floor plan, as well as either returning the house to its original style or sort of upgrading the material language of the mid-century style without losing it entirely.
Della Hansmann
When you are thinking about making improvements to your kitchen. I want you to think about upgrading from a classic, original mid-century kitchen floor plan that said there are some reasons to keep it. If it works for you, that’s fine. I have absolutely had clients who in their household only one person does cook. They do like to go away and be private in the kitchen, make a big mess and then produce food as a delightful surprise, a presentation for everyone else in the house they want to be going in there and left alone for them, the classic mid-century kitchen floor plan is perfect.
Della Hansmann
But if you have more of a family flow, if you want to be able to host more easily, if you want to encourage your kids to come help you in the kitchen, If you and your spouse or partner want to collaborate on meals, you may already be deeply familiar with the frustrations of that mid-century kitchen floor plan and want to make changes to it, and you can.
Della Hansmann
So let’s talk about some of the different ways to consider improvements to a kitchen floor plan and why they do or don’t work. If you Google kitchen floor plan ideas, you’re going to hit almost instantly on the concept of the kitchen work triangle. I’ve talked about this in the podcast before, and I do like it in some ways. It basically the kitchen triangle is the imaginary lines that you can draw between the sink, the range and the refrigerator, and you don’t want to have very many steps between them.
Della Hansmann
There is a smallest amount. It’s not good. It’s generally not considered great to have the three of them, just like in a line, if a triangle is a flat line, people don’t like that. But having them relatively close to each other and without any sort of corners or walking around an island to get between them is considered to be good.
Della Hansmann
Why? I don’t like it is that it harks back to the basic fundamental flaw of the mid-century kitchen floor plan, which is that it is fixated on one person cooking. That triangle is a magic zone where one person can take only a few steps and efficiently get to all the parts of the kitchen. But we do more things in our kitchen, then wash dishes, grab food from a storage container and heat it up.
Della Hansmann
When people update the concept of the kitchen work triangle, they often say, so here’s the cooking zone, and then there’s, then there’s a social zone that needs to be not interrupting the kitchen work triangle. And that, again, does make sense. But I think this is a limited way to think about your kitchen, and actually may be counterproductive, depending on the way that you and your household produce food.
Della Hansmann
So a second way to think about a practical How do you test your mid-century kitchen floor plan for workability for your life, is to think about kitchen work zones. This is often set up as a contrasting philosophy to the kitchen work triangle. This designates specific zones that the kitchen should have, and they should be grouped together.
Della Hansmann
Often, it’s broken down to just four. The storage zone, which is the pantry and fridge. The cooking zone, your oven, your cooktop, your microwave. The prep zone, flat area where you do chopping, mixing, planning. And a cleaning zone, dishes, dishwasher. Sure sink.
Della Hansmann
This can work depending on your mindset, but it is. It’s a little limited. For me, a variation on the kitchen work zone concept is to think about a sort of an assembly line process of how food moves through your kitchen. I’ve read whole books on kitchen design that focus on this, and this, again, takes a very factory assembly line, early 1900s ergonomics approach to a kitchen.
Della Hansmann
But basically the idea is that you think about how food travels through your kitchen as it comes from the grocery store or the garden, and then it moves first, it’s going to come in, it’s going to hit a refrigerator or a pantry, so those should be close to your exterior door.
Della Hansmann
Then the next thing that’s going to happen is it comes out onto a work surface to be prepared. So that should be sort of your next zone. From there, it’s going to go into the cooking area and need to be heated up, or otherwise, you know, made ready for eating.
Della Hansmann
And then it goes out of the kitchen to be eaten. Dishes are used at that point. And then finally, it comes back into the kitchen, empty plates to be cleaned and where the dishes go away into the process matters. Now that can be a useful frame to think about, or sort of test the layout of your kitchen, and it leads to some useful conceptions, like your pantry and refrigerator should probably be relatively close to the entry door, the access point where food is coming into the house, which is something that I often check for when I’m sort of looking at a master plan process for a mid-century kitchen floor plan.
Della Hansmann
And it’s kind of a fun way to shake up the idea so food and storage close to the door, and then maybe dishes, and particularly silverware, should be housed in a spot that’s closer to the border between your kitchen and your eating areas, whether that’s an eat in spot or a dining spot, maybe particularly, the silverware drawer should be placed on the opposite side of a peninsula or island that’s easily accessible from the table.
Della Hansmann
This always makes me think of my grandparents, mid-century Time Capsule house. It was built in 1953 and like, fully furnished from a furniture store. And I don’t think they made a change to it until they left. I mean, they eventually had a computer, but wow, yeah, that house really was. It was museum quality right up until the time of their deaths in the early 2000s and they had in their incredibly classic mid-century kitchen floor plan with a sort of a U shaped kitchen on one side of a longer space and then an eat in second space with a little round oval table that had windows that looked out into the backyard.
Della Hansmann
You walked around the end of a peninsula to get to the eat in space, and the silverware drawer lived on the opposite side of the peninsula from the working kitchen, so you could sit in one of the chairs at the table and reach back and grab an extra fork or spoon. I also, just as a fun fact, I have their not their silver, but their, you know, aluminum pressed daily dish, daily forks, knives and spoons, silverware set. And I, I love it. It makes me so happy, and it connects me to them.
Della Hansmann
It meant that every time you did the dishes in that household, you had to take the little dish rack out of the dishwasher, which, by the way, it didn’t, wasn’t built in, but like was a free standing appliance that rolled around so you could roll it up and connect it by a hose to the sink and then unconnected from the sink faucet and roll it back into a corner to be out of the way. Ish. Out of the way. Ish is the best. Great. I’m going to give that that functionality, but you had to take out the little silverware caddy and walk it around to the silverware drawer to put away the silver because it was inconveniently located from the rest of the kitchen, but convenient to the table.
Della Hansmann
So that’s kind of the Food Travel zone philosophy. To me, none of those really completely wash more realistic if you’re thinking about how to improve your mid-century kitchen floor plan is to think about who is cooking in your kitchen and who is hanging out in your kitchen when those things are happening, and why.
Della Hansmann
So that very same floor plan that my grandparents kitchen had a U shape with a peninsula, sort of cutting it off from a blank table area has popped up in a number of clients homes, as I have done mid-century master plans for them, and this has either worked for them or been the absolute rumination of their daily life, depending on who cooks in their house and when. In one example, for a family with small kids, it was a disaster.
Della Hansmann
Both parents would be in the kitchen trying to hurry up, make snacks, feed, make the kid food, make their food. The kids would come in and get under foot. It was hard to get around the peninsula to the table when they needed assistance with their foods, with their dinner process, and the adults were constantly bumping butts, basically hip checking each other as they were moving back and forth across that open area in the center of the U they were desperate for a new mid-century kitchen floor plan.
Della Hansmann
And when I looked at their problem, I saw that one we could blow up the whole. Layout, we could remove that Peninsula entirely so they could have easy flow and access out to the Eden area, perhaps even put in a Long Island. This would have been, certainly a few years ago. The solution would be to tear out the peninsula and run a long island down the center, narrow length of the kitchen, and have it half of the island would be sort of a work zone and then put stools around the other half and have it be an eat in island.
Della Hansmann
I did see, though, that they could make a less invasive change their space. The U of their kitchen work area was large enough that they could benefit from a tiny center island, a free standing piece of furniture to give the cooks a reason to go around something rather than to cross straight across the open area of the U let’s call this segment of the podcast.
Della Hansmann
Della says you need a tiny island in your kitchen no matter what. Go buy one from your house ASAP, regardless of when you plan to remodel. Okay? The tiny island I am. I grew up in a house with a center butcher block. My mom bought this solid I believe it’s oak butcher block from the Scandinavian imports furniture store where she was a bookkeeper in her late 20s and has hauled it around to every kitchen, she’s ever had my whole life.
Della Hansmann
I have talked about this on the podcast before. I love this object. I covet this object. I have a free standing Butcher Block Island in my kitchen as well. It’s not as cool as hers, but it works. But so I’m biased. I grew up with this. I see the logic of it, but it also solves a problem that I tend to think of as the open water shipping lanes issue of a U shaped kitchen. Or maybe you could think about it as an empty parking lot problem when everyone is facing their work surface with their back to the rest of the room, a classic problem of the mid-century, kitchen floor plan.
Della Hansmann
All of the work surfaces face away from the center of the room. This situation is almost guaranteed to happen. Someone is working and they think of something you need across the kitchen, so they rotate on the spot, turn and walk directly towards it. The odds are good that at some point the other person working at their face away cook zone is going to have the exact same feeling. They’ll turn in the opposite direction, rotate around, and they’ll end up smashing right into each other, or at least having to dodge.
Della Hansmann
On the other hand, if you’re standing and working at a prep surface and your partner is, for example, facing 90 degrees away, you’re at the kitchen sink, and on your left side, they’re doing something at a chopping area. You realize you need something from the pantry, which is directly behind you, if you turn to go get something, and there’s a small center Butcher Block Island in the middle of the space, you’re going to rotate to the right and go around the far right side of the butcher block.
Della Hansmann
Just as they think of something, they’ll turn left and reach to grab what they need from the same wall that you’re heading towards, but you won’t bump into each other. I know this sounds overdramatic, smashing into each other in the kitchen, but the lighter version of it, a hip check from your loving spouse by one or both of you as you hold something heavy, sharp, hot or a combination of the above is not a great situation, and does happen regularly in an L or U shaped kitchen with nothing to break up the center.
Della Hansmann
How do I know? Well, I’ve done it myself, and dozens of my clients have come to me with this exact problem. It happens in a galley kitchen where two people are working. It happens in an L shaped kitchen where two people are working. It happens in a U shaped kitchen where two people are working, if there’s nothing to sort of guide you around the space. That first example I mentioned a galley kitchen is an example of the way that not every kitchen problem can be solved this way. If the space between the counters is too small and snug, there simply isn’t room for another piece of furniture.
Della Hansmann
But I’m a big believer in the small, small island, even one that is less than a block of cabinets, less than two foot by two foot, if you could put in this as both a traffic control device as well as a handy piece in its own right, a place in the center of the room to set things down and even for two people to stand and face each other while prep work is happening.
Della Hansmann
There is no better option for that kitchen, and it’s particularly a good solution for a temporary improvement to stave off the need for a bigger remodel, or a way to salvage the layout of an original mid-century kitchen floor plan without having to scrape it out and start from scratch with a big modern Island if you love your original cabinets.
Della Hansmann
But the problem is, it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough space to figure out if an island will actually fit in your kitchen of any size is challenging and the right size and the optimum proportions, the relationship of worktop space and circulation space, the distance between one counter service and another, is both particular. There are rules of thumb for it and personal.
Della Hansmann
It depends on you, your family, the way you work in the kitchen. This is the reason people hire me, mid mod Midwest to create master plans and show them options for the kitchen. Sometimes it’s not as simple as stick an island in there, but I will tell you that if you’re struggling with a kitchen that feels small, but also you constantly run into your co cook while you move across an open space trying to get work done, a tiny island might be your answer.
Della Hansmann
On the other hand, there is the rarity of the mid-century kitchen floor plan a house with a lot of space. If you’re gifted with lots of space, you may have more possibilities for how to organize it. I just worked on a project like this, where the existing house had a very generous footprint, and the new owners were eager to make of it a family and friend hub zone. All of their people were going to come and gather at this house regularly.
Della Hansmann
One option that I ended up proposing for them was an L of work surfaces facing two walls, and then a double Island arrangement in the center of the space, one that was more oriented for prep work and cooking tasks, and one that was basically just for people to sit around and chat.
Della Hansmann
In the end, after they saw the options, the ultimate design we landed on was to narrow that open floor area a little more by putting a full height wall of storage opposite the L with pantry overflow, but also a drinks fridge and sort of snack Grab and Go things, and also some entry storage, and then one very oversized island in The middle of the working space with room on one edge for the cook to move back and forth along the L and along the inner edge of the island, and then seating for non-cooking family members and guests around two and a half other sides of the island.
Della Hansmann
Now for a more introverted family, that kind of big Nancy Meyers magazine quality kitchen would be a waste of space, and honestly, kind of echoey and lonely and hard to fill up with just one person or two. But for these folks, it’s just what they want. So the point is to personalize it. The right floor plan for your kitchen depends on who cooks, what you cook regularly, and how you do it.
Della Hansmann
Another interesting micro example, just sometimes to check your own expectations, rather than assuming that you need to have all the pieces that you see in someone else’s home or in a magazine house. My best friend’s family hails from India. Her parents moved to this country as adults, and she grew up here from Middle School on.
Della Hansmann
So she cooks the food her family loves but also has a range of more American typical recipes based on her different life experience from them. When her brother came to visit her for a few weeks recently, she discovered that a couple of key pieces of cookware just vanished out of her kitchen. She could not find them for the life of her and she looked everywhere before she realized that he probably stored them in the oven in her home of origin and in his kitchen.
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The oven is an appliance that is literally a waste of space because they don’t cook in an oven. Everything is done on the stove top. The oven is just a poorly constructed pan storage area for her. It is a handy device that helps her cook some of the dishes that she likes. She just hadn’t used it in the time she was looking for those missing pans. If you ever watch the show Sex and the City, another way to think of an oven as a storage device is if you really don’t cook at all, if you’re just heating up takeout.
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But for certain people, an oven is just a waste of space. I wouldn’t recommend for those people that they center the design of their kitchen around that they might want to have an oven for the occasional whatnot, or you could choose to not have one at all. But you want to think about what you’re orienting your kitchen around based on the way that you cook. Another example, some people cook with a microwave for everything, reheating takeout.
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Other people use a microwave to speed up part of certain steps in the food that they prepare, and still others grew up in households or have decided as adults that the microwave is something that just ruins your food. It’s destroying nutritional value. It’s creepy. Why would you ever so for people in those situations, the place that you set a microwave oven, whether you build it in or keep it in a pantry or in a drawer, is a very different decision, and it depends on your and your household’s preferences.
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Never going to be able to copy an existing mid-century kitchen layout or, God forbid, an update layout from a magazine, even if you saw it was totally pretty even if you found it in atomic ranch magazine, even if you saw it in your neighbor’s house and their floor plan started out the exact same as yours.
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First off, the logistics of it may simply not be right, unless they have the exact arrangement of windows doors, the exact proportion of inches in width and length. It’s very unlikely that this same exact design is going to work well for you, but even if your original mid-century kitchen floor plan was identical, your lifestyle is not the same as the person whose kitchen remodel you’re inspired by is.
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So ask yourself again, what do you cook? How do you cook it? And what happens in your kitchen besides potentially cooking and eating food, a lot of things have changed in our lives between the mid-century era and now. I talked about this way back in season one, maybe episode 103 or 104 about how the people who are in our kitchens, the way we’re using our kitchens, the time spent on food preparation, have shifted dramatically since the era.
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When all of the mid-century kitchen layouts were baked into our houses, is a certain amount of chicken versus egg question in this when you’re thinking about how you like to cook in your home, some of the way you’re used to cooking might have been affected by the floor plan of whatever era of house, whatever place you were living in, one of the questions I ask my clients when I think about the kitchen and how I will propose options for them is how they use it, and if they’re moving into a new house, often how they have used a kitchen in the past, how their previous kitchens have worked for them or not.
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But if you’ve lived with an original mid-century kitchen floor plan for a long time, the way that you cook and the way that you live in your house has already been conditioned by that footprint. So on a recent call with a client who had slowly tackled improving every other part of their charming mid-century house, but the kitchen now, they lived in that house for upwards of 10 years, and it’s their last, their top, their biggest priority.
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I had to approach this a different way, because the way that her family prepares and lives around food is very much conditioned by the shape and the structure of the mid-century kitchen floor plan that they have. So I had to ask her, How would you like to make food? How would you imagine yourself with a different division of labor, bringing your kids into the process of food preparation. What would you like the social life of your kitchen to be?
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This takes a bit more imagination, but you may need to ask yourself the same question. To recap, I tend to favor for my own brainstorming, a modified version of zone based kitchen planning, after I’ve gathered my information about the original mid-century kitchen floor plan or whatever’s happened to it in the intervening decades, and after I’ve had detailed chats with the clients about the way they want to cook, the way they want to live, the way they socialize, host or don’t I try to set it up with the right degree of openness to the rest of the house, the right degree of openness to itself the right space and maximizing what we can do with the footprint that exists.
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There is no right answer. It’s always going to be specific to the cooking style, to the rest of the house, to the hosting and daily life preferences from there, I start with what I think of as the working zones of a kitchen, prep, heating, washing, and then any other specialized zones that the client may have called for, for baking, a space for processing garden foods, for Sunday batch cooking. That’s going to depend on the family. Once I’ve got that area, which you could think of as the kitchen work triangle, but it’s more flexible than that. I add in storage.
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And instead of just thinking of a single storage zone, I’m often making little pockets of areas for specialized storage that are perhaps easily accessible to a hot source to the water, or that someone could sort of zip in without getting in the range of someone who’s doing more detailed cooking prep, to grab a snack, to set up coffee, to Make breakfast while lunches are being prepared, breakfast and coffee materials, being in one easy to grab spot are key things that often come up in people’s kitchen preferences these days, and a bigger pantry storage area can be a few steps further away. Look a mid-century kitchen floor plan can’t always accommodate everything. Being in arms reach it may just be too awkward, but you can still have your most grabbed items handy if you plan it right.
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And then there’s the third essential zone of a good, updated kitchen, which is the hangout space, somewhere to sit. Specifically, I am always trying to build in somewhere for someone to sit down and be comfortable. In the last 30 years of kitchen remodels, this is typically meant bar stools at a peninsula or an island, and I don’t have anything specifically against a bar stool, but let’s think beyond it, an eat in table, a comfortable, padded bench, or just a bench between some full high built ins, even a free standing but comfortable armchair tucked into a corner.
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All of these mid-century kitchen floor plan considerations, by the way, are hit in my handy guide to a great mid mod kitchen update. You can get that for free at mid mod dash midwest.com/kitchen if you don’t have it yet. And by the way, that free download has a secret discount for the kitchen clinic on its thank you page.
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So if you sign up for it, the page you’ll be taken to after you put in your email address will offer you a discount to this weekend’s live clinic if you have already signed up for the free mid-century kitchen guide, you can’t it won’t be delivered to your email again if you sign up twice, but it will take you to the thank you page if you sign up twice. So you can go get that discount there anytime you want to save yourself a few dollars and please.
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The conclusion to all of this is, let’s talk more about your mid-century kitchen floor plan and the style of the finishes you’ll choose, and all of the driving factors that are going to make the perfect update for your kitchen at this weekend’s live clinic, I really. Hope I see you there.
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Before I let you go. Let’s talk about our mid-century house feature of the week. I want to stay in the kitchen. Let’s talk about the kitchen desk. Does it even still have a place? Well, first of all, what is it in the classic mid-century kitchen floor plan you often find among the other built ins, often at sort of an end of a run of cabinets, a built in desk with a little tuck away chair. It had a writing surface, maybe a pin up board. Often the house telephone could be mounted in that spot.
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It’s not usually long on chargers because or outlets because people weren’t really having a lot of rechargeable kitchen paraphernalia at that point or life paraphernalia, but it could be really pleasant. It’s a cute look in a mid-century kitchen, and it can still be useful today if your household tends to manage paper mail in a continuous spot, or if you want a spot for tablets, for laptops, for charging cords to be corralled.
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On the other hand, it’s very much a time capsule, relic of that, that patriarchal housewife idea that this is the wife desk, this is the household accounting books, recipe files desk. This is a spot for a person who just lives in the kitchen for that work to be done. And it might make more sense to have a more multi use space along an island or a peninsula that you can sometimes do that kind of logistical work at, and just a drawer where things can be tucked away with a handy outlet.
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We don’t tend to need a space to mount a wall mounted phone anymore, and sometimes a desk chair pushed up against the cabinets in the kitchen just becomes a tripping hazard. If you have your original mid-century kitchen floor plan and you like it and your cabinets are in good shape, I would offer that it might be fun to keep such a feature as a built in desk, but it’s also it’s valuable real estate that might not be best used in that space.
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So I’m curious, what do you think? Do you have, have you personally got a kitchen desk? Have you got pleasant memories of one in your maybe grandparents or parents’ home? What’s your thought on the value of a desk in the kitchen? Is it completely out of place? Is it actually a good idea? What do you think I would love to know?
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I’ll throw a few pictures of some of the cutest examples of mid-century kitchen desks into the show notes page, which, again, of course, you can get at mid mod midwest.com/what, are we on? 2005, that’s all for today. Basically, what is the summary of this episode?
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The floor plan. Your mid-century kitchen floor plan depends on you, on your household, on your household, on your preferences. You’re not going to be able to copy paste this from somewhere else, and I don’t recommend that you mindlessly stick with the original mid-century floor plan of your house if it doesn’t work for you.
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But if you want to talk about improving your floor plan with little tweaks or with big transformations, I hope I’ll see you at the mid-century kitchen clinic on Saturday, it’s going to be a blast. All right, hope I see you there.