Latest / Mid Mod Remodel / The OG open plan kitchen
Transcript
- 0:00Let's round out the kitchen season with one kitchen in particular.
- 0:06I often get asked by clients if it's okay to put an island layout into the kitchen of a mid-century house.
- 0:12And my answer is always, yeah, of course it is.
- 0:14While builder-grade ranches in the Midwest typically had an L or sometimes a U of wall engaged cabinets, there were some original island designs even in the mid-century years.
- 0:23And one of my personal island kitchen icons is the one designed into the Stall House, or Case Study House 22, by California architect Pierre Koenig.
- 0:35This house is mid-century modern with an all-caps modern, but I think it also can serve as inspiration for any of us trying to make mid-century appropriate choices for houses today.
- 0:44Hey there.
- 0:45Welcome back to Mid-Mod Remodel.
- 0:47This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life.
- 0:51I'm your host, architect Della Hansman, Mid-Century Ranch enthusiast.
- 0:55You are listening to episode 2407.
- 0:59Okay, so a couple of bits of business before I get into talking about what's cool about this house, what's individual about this house, and what we can learn as potential modifiers of mid-century kitchens from this particular house.
- 1:15This is going to be the last episode of season 24 of the Mid-Mod Remodel Podcast, and we're going to take a little break lasting until mid-July.
- 1:23We'll be back with another season focusing on bathrooms, another incredibly common area for remodels, and an area that's important to get very right if you're thinking about making great choices for your mid-century home.
- 1:36Between now and next season, there's a couple of key calendar items I want to draw your attention to.
- 1:41The first one is that this weekend, well, really next Monday, is my birthday.
- 1:47And not to make it all about me, I actually want to make it all about you.
- 1:50Every year on my birthday, I discount the Midmod Remodel courses and learning products.
- 1:56So if you are curious about joining Ready to Remodel and getting round-the-year calendar advice on how to make good choices for your house and getting access to the suite of support materials, guides, references, lessons on mid-century structure, mid-century layouts, mid-century materials, all of that is included in Ready to Remodel.
- 2:17And we will be discounting that and all of the two-hour design clinics, like the mid-century kitchen cleaner recording, which we just re-upped, by 44%.
- 2:26Watch your email this weekend only for that discount.
- 2:30And I guess the party that I'm inviting you to is next month's Architect's Office Hours as a happy member of Ready to Remodel.
- 2:36And then for every month thereafter, on the first Monday of every month, we get together and I answer all of the pressing questions that my current remodel students have got about their homes, how to talk to contractors, how to choose materials, how the height to hang your pendant lights, tricky layout challenges, all of that and more.
- 2:53So I'd love to have you take advantage of this.
- 2:56This sale happens only once a year, but it's been a fun tradition, and we always it's fun to get an influx of new members joining the Mid Mod Remod Squad for my birthday and yours.
- 3:07Um the other thing to note is if you're looking for hands-on design advice and assistance from MidMod Midwest, then we will be having our annual summer office closure the week before and after the 4th of July this year.
- 3:23So we won't be taking new uh work in during that time.
- 3:27And we our current clients will, hey, if you're listening, you'll hear from us that we won't be communicating with you during that time.
- 3:33We'll all be refreshing our creativity and our energy and being whole human beings during those two weeks.
- 3:38But I will say, if you've been thinking about starting a design process for your home at any point in the near future, then I recommend you get onto our calendar for uh a one-on-one conversation with me sooner rather than later in the month of June.
- 3:53We've been booking out quite far right now.
- 3:55Something about everyone's mood has got people feeling active, and we are booking out for projects.
- 4:00Design projects for signing now are gonna be finishing up in the fall.
- 4:04So if you have ambitions for changes to your house you want to make this year and you'd like to work with MidMod Midwest to make those changes, now is absolutely the right time to fill in our apply to work with us form on our services page.
- 4:16You can find links to all the different references I'm gonna make during this episode and how to work with us and information about the birthday sale on the website at midmod-midwest.com slash 2407.
- 4:30Okay, so let's talk about the stall house because it's been on my mind recently for several reasons, one of which is that it is currently for sale.
- 4:40Yes, this piece of mid-century history is a private residence, and as is the right of the private residence's owners, um, now the children, the I would say quite adult children of the original owners, they have decided to no longer be responsible for this and they have put the home on the market.
- 5:00There is it's such an iconic house.
- 5:02It is a national landmark that wallpaper magazine wrote an article about the fact that it's been listed for$25 million.
- 5:10If you have$25 million laying around and you would like to make a lifelong commitment to architectural history, maybe check out that article and the listing.
- 5:18If you don't have$25 million, check it out either way.
- 5:23This house is, I mean, it's not a mid-century ranch.
- 5:28It's not mid-modest or anything along those kinds, but it is, in my opinion, a perfect example of fitting a design to the specific place and the specific needs of a family.
- 5:41As are all of the case study houses, they're really what's the plural of Tour de Force?
- 5:48They are really Tours de Force?
- 5:50I don't know.
- 5:50I don't speak French very well at all, really.
- 5:53But they are they are all incredible adventures into what is possible with creativity in design.
- 6:03And although, yes, it was not a cheap house at the time, it was a reasonably priced house at the time.
- 6:08Now, of course, it's$25 million, but it doesn't, it's not laden in luxury, it's not enormous, it does have a truly incredible view looking out over a precipice at the city of LA below it.
- 6:22But this house really to me represents what's possible when we take constraints and make them interesting.
- 6:32It has a couple of specifically fascinating features.
- 6:36The bedrooms, front right onto the pool.
- 6:38There is basically no front of the house.
- 6:39You pull into a little carport, walk through a little gated opening, and find yourself walking along the bedrooms, which look out of the pool, you get to the bedrooms from the pool deck, and then looking at the L-shaped part of the house that projects out over the cliff edge, which is kitchen first, dining area next, and then the projecting living room with an open, floating hearth.
- 7:01It's a steel and glass structure.
- 7:03It's really remarkable.
- 7:04I, if you can't conjure images of this when you hear the name Stallhouse, go check out some links on the website to images of it.
- 7:13But today I want to talk about the kitchen specifically because it's a really interesting space.
- 7:18I want to talk about it in plan, the way it works from a circulation perspective.
- 7:22I want to talk about it in elevation, the way that different heights of different parts of the kitchen relate to each other, and I want to talk about it in perspective, the way that the house relates, the way you see it from the pool deck, the way you see it from the living room, the way you see the kitchen from the dining room.
- 7:38You will not remodel your regular house to look like the stallhouse.
- 7:44You've got to start from scratch to make it that.
- 7:47And you will not remodel your kitchen to look exactly like this kitchen.
- 7:52But there are design moves we can take from this house.
- 7:56And when Koenig was designing this, he used an island layout in a relatively open space plan in a similar way multiple times.
- 8:07He doesn't put out island completely on display the way that a modern sort of blow it all out open plan remodel would do.
- 8:13He does create some privacy.
- 8:17In fact, um, as I'll get to a little bit later, he designed the kitchen of this house with sliding panels that could block it off somewhat from view.
- 8:25Although I would really love to know if they were ever actually used regularly by the occupants of the house.
- 8:33But he designs a central island that you work around and then a secondary island, which serves as kind of a buffet or a bar counter that screens the space visually from the more social parts of the house.
- 8:46When you look at the house in plan, I'll put I'll sketch up a rough plan and put it on the show notes page.
- 8:52You will you will think that the kitchen is entirely the open center of the house.
- 8:57And that's not untrue, but it is also very visually self-contained.
- 9:01It has a specific material language that happens only in and around the kitchen.
- 9:05The ceiling is actually dropped slightly over the kitchen area.
- 9:08It has its own lighting solution that it may be fluorescent lights behind an opaque or a translucent screen, which, if so, I hope they've fixed that with LEDs by now.
- 9:18But it has a drop ceiling.
- 9:20It is surrounded and defined in a very particular way.
- 9:23His go-to combination um for kitchens, and I if you if you read books about him, if you scroll through examples of him, I'll link to his reference page on usmodernist.org.
- 9:34You can see a number of his houses have riffs on this kitchen design.
- 9:40I actually don't know whether this was his first or his last, his greatest, his pinnacle.
- 9:44I'm not sure, but this kitchen is excellent, usable, social, and I'm sure has always been really the heart of the home.
- 9:52One thing he does that I adore is that he has part of its open plan and part of it has a full height wall where he has an embedded refrigerator spot.
- 10:02So you can slide it in and it feels not chunky, not sort of standing out blocking space.
- 10:07He's got a wall oven and probably an added after the market, aftermarket uh wall microwave in a full height storage area.
- 10:15And on that same bit of wall, there is a bit of wall-facing countertop with side enclosures.
- 10:20On one side it's the whole wall fridge, and on the other side it's the built-in wall space.
- 10:24This is really helpful to have in a kitchen, even in a relatively wide open kitchen, to have a little bit of counter that's more protected, a place to tuck something somewhat out of complete view, clutter is a little less visible in that spot, and you've got a bit of kitchen wall surface for plugging things into or posting up messages or recipes on or putting some common phone numbers on, regardless of how open plan the rest of the structure is.
- 10:49The indisputable center of this kitchen concept that you see perfectly exemplified in the stallhouse is a generous four-foot island that I think is 10 or maybe 12 feet long.
- 11:00I have to check my notes on that.
- 11:02But it has room for full-depth undercounter cabinets accessible from both sides.
- 11:08He places the main kitchen sink here.
- 11:10There are drawers for common reach and tools.
- 11:11There's a space with no storage underneath that you can pull up a chair and sit in the main working side.
- 11:17And then the cooktop, not the it's not a range, it's a wall oven and a cooktop, is also located in that island.
- 11:24There's a fairly clearly defined working side of this big island and then prep or assistance side.
- 11:30The work side is has this sort of kitchen triangle appliances in it.
- 11:33It's got access to the refrigerator, to the oven, to the cooktop, and to the main sink.
- 11:38On the opposite side, there's a secondary sink in the little bar stool, rather, in the little um bar height counter.
- 11:46And that's a space where someone could sit and look at the cook, or could chop and prep with the cook, or could do a more elaborate baking project, or spread out homework, whatever you want.
- 11:55They're in the kitchen area, but you're not in the kitchen working zone.
- 11:59I did note that it is an electric cooktop in the island, nicely spaced out from the main sink.
- 12:05So the nice thing about having a full island that you can circulate all the way around is that you've got multiple types of work that can happen multiple types of places.
- 12:16In fact, you've got the secondary island, the narrow one that separates her from the dining room, could be handy for bar top duties facing the dining area, among other things.
- 12:25And it is backed with a breakfast bar style higher divider that screens it visually from the dining area.
- 12:33This is really important to the perspective viewing of this kitchen.
- 12:37The fact that there are four posts, four columns inside the house, non-structural, that define the edge of the, or four column points.
- 12:47There's sort of lighter mini columns that define the island that separates it from the dining room.
- 12:53But there are vertical elements that surround all four corners of the kitchen within the house unit.
- 12:59There are circulation aisles on both sides, and that that higher island that separates it from the dining room has both a bar height counter that gives you just a little bit of visual privacy and some floating upper shelves that again, you can see through them, you can talk through them, you can pass through them, but they create a sense of separation between the dining area and the kitchen.
- 13:20They also very practically block your view.
- 13:23Specifically, if you are sitting at the dining area at the dining table, you are no longer able to get eyes on a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink or any remaining detritus from the meal prep.
- 13:33It's all screened from your view, screened from your guest's view as well.
- 13:38This is a really lovely thing.
- 13:39And I think when we are thinking about how to interpolate or borrow ideas from this kitchen, having a relatively open connection between a kitchen and another space is fine, if that's your preference.
- 13:55In my episode a few ago, my interview with Adam, uh, where we talked about the definition of a mid-century kitchen, we defined it as a room with four walls.
- 14:03This is definitely not a room with four walls, but it is still defined as a space.
- 14:09It's a space with four sides.
- 14:11And the biggest distinction, actually, there are two the strongest wall side is a real wall that separates the kitchen from the corridor that leads to the bathroom and owner's bedroom and private spaces in the house.
- 14:24And the next strongest, we'll call it a quote wall, unquote, is that separation between the kitchen and the dining room.
- 14:30And then on the on the two sides that face out to uh the neighbor's yard beyond and out to the pool deck on the inner L, there's not much of a sense of wall, but there is an overhead connection.
- 14:41If you were in the space in three dimensions, you would feel it as a defined space.
- 14:47So this is what's so interesting to me.
- 14:51If we think about the stallhouse, the iconic image, the um Julia Schulman photograph that is probably most commonly shown of the stallhouse is not the kitchen.
- 15:00It's a shot taken at night of two women in circle skirts sitting in mid-century minimalist furniture in a glass and steel box suspended out over the night skyline of LA.
- 15:14High drama sticks in your mind.
- 15:17It's gorgeous.
- 15:18Um honestly, I've I have not been to the stallhouse.
- 15:21I would love to.
- 15:21I hope that the new owners permit tours because it it's on my bucket list and I'm not made it there yet.
- 15:28Uh, I am not great with heights, and I wonder how I'll feel if I get a chance to stand in that living room.
- 15:32Personally, I'll probably spend more time standing in the kitchen for two reasons.
- 15:35One, because I like it better, and two, because I don't like feeling like I'm standing over a cliff edge.
- 15:40But this house is so much more interesting to me than that high drama image because the kitchen is so specifically functional.
- 15:52Thinking about it in perspective, it does so much.
- 15:55Thinking about just a straight cut section through it, the different full height and partial height areas where you can reach across, where you can walk across, where you can see across, is so well thought out, so specific.
- 16:06Um, it really makes me wonder about the the personal life, the history, the interests of the architect, Pierre Koenig.
- 16:15Did he cook?
- 16:15Did he spend time in a kitchen?
- 16:17What was his level of sympathy for the women in his life who are more likely to have been expected to spend time in kitchens at that point?
- 16:22He really uh put empathy into this space.
- 16:28What was his uh conversation style with the original owner of the home?
- 16:33What did she request and how literally was that request carried out?
- 16:40I've mentioned several times that the house you don't understand in plan how it feels connected and how it feels specific, but it is actually a fascinating space to discuss in plan.
- 16:51When we talk about circulation, sorry, architect word, when we talk about how you move around this space, there are generous, if not enormous, aisles of movement surrounding the kitchen and within the kitchen.
- 17:02Part of the reason that an island of any size is really useful in a kitchen, part of the reason that I recommend putting a 22 inch by 22 inch piece of furniture butcher block into the center of a classic mid-century U-shaped kitchen, even if it's only seven feet across from one cabinet face to the other, is that humans are so capable of getting into traffic jams unless there is a defined route of traffic.
- 17:24Okay.
- 17:24We're gonna take a pause on talking about iconic California high modernism, and we're gonna talk about urban planning and the use of snow to map routes of travel in Midwestern cities.
- 17:38This is gonna be relevant, I promise.
- 17:40I care a lot about urban planning as well, even though I don't talk about it very much here, because my sister, who is a family medicine doctor with a deep professional interest in pedestrian safety in walkable and multimodal cities as a health indicator, has done a lot of research, uh, particularly in her MPH, on pedestrian safety, on bike safety, on urban planning infrastructure.
- 18:04And here's something that becomes very clear when you start to study this, which is that human behavior is more modified by physical structure than it is by a suggestion.
- 18:14You can paint stripes on the street, and at the end of the day, cars will, people in cars will ignore them most of the time.
- 18:23But any amount of actual built infrastructure makes a night and day difference.
- 18:27That's why poured cement bump outs at a pedestrian crosswalk do cause drivers to slow down.
- 18:33And you can actually, when I mention the word snack down, if you have not heard this, this is a weird little fun thing to Google.
- 18:39This is when you look for patterns in snowy winter landscapes, in urban landscapes, um, to see where the drive patterns are and where the walking patterns are, and you can see the worn away parts in the snow to see how people are or are not using parts of the street.
- 18:52And then you can go in and sort of mark out, oh, you know what, no one's actually even driving here, and also they shouldn't be.
- 18:57So why are we making this pavement?
- 18:59This should be uh a concrete bumper with a little bit of a urban garden in it, and that'll make it safer for someone to walk less of a distance across car area from one sidewalk to the next.
- 19:11If you did not know the term snack down, you've just learned something new, and I bet you did not expect to get it in an article in a podcast on the Stallhouse and Pierre Koenig and Julia Schulman.
- 19:21Uh but the other thing that's really true is that so like a zebra stripe paint job on the job on the ground doesn't do the same job as a pedestrian bump out.
- 19:29Similarly, painting a solid white line to define a bike lane in a wide road does not protect that bike lane.
- 19:36Um, in the Wisconsin winter, it becomes absolutely invisible to the eye as soon as we get a solid slick of snow on the roads.
- 19:41And even in the middle of summer, when it's completely visible, people will park in that bike lane if they personally feel a need.
- 19:48But even the slightest little row of built-in bollards, vertically plastic, vertically mounted plastic dividers spaced out every six or twelve feet, and a tiny little concrete bumper that any person killer modern SUV could easily roll right over, does very effectively prevent people from parking in the bike lane and keep the bike lane safe.
- 20:09It's a huge difference in protection for bikers.
- 20:12And even though the step up from conceptual to actual is really small, it makes them feel nearly as safe as a chunky concrete wall, but with better visibility.
- 20:22So, what does this mean for the stall house?
- 20:25Having, as we have in this floor plan, two distinct full loops of circulation.
- 20:30So you could get around the kitchen by going around the island, little loop, or you could get around the kitchen by making a full loop out through the bedroom hallway, around through the dining room.
- 20:40You could go outside the house.
- 20:42I don't know that you can get outside the house on the neighbor side.
- 20:45So maybe it's two overlapping loops.
- 20:48But there's such a good way to get around.
- 20:50You can always move around the other way.
- 20:53And having multiple routes, you can go around one side, you can go around the other side of the island, allows for slimmer spacing inside the kitchen itself, more space devoted to the counter surfaces, and then you can run around someone rather than hip bumping with them to get to something on the other side.
- 21:09Sure, it's a few more steps, but it makes it possible.
- 21:14I find it to be really interesting that you can actually approach the kitchen from two sides.
- 21:21You can walk along the outer edge of the house and you can walk along the inner pool-oriented edge of the house, and that they chose to make it a full island rather than a wall-engaged peninsula on one side.
- 21:33I really would love to know use case, you know, how much people did come up one side versus the other, slickerware patterns in the flooring material or something like that.
- 21:43But it is also a very creative, pleasing balance of the space and deals very nicely with the the walls of the house being essentially huge sheets of glass and big sliding glass doors.
- 21:55So here's the thing about this house the choices.
- 22:00Made for this kitchen would not work everywhere.
- 22:02This house has a lot of features that we can be inspired by and we can generalize from.
- 22:06Have a look.
- 22:07I'm going to be doing some sketching after I wrap up this episode and I'll put the sketches in the show notes.
- 22:13On the way that I think this house works so beautifully, some of the features that can be adapted or borrowed.
- 22:19I love the way that the cabinets float.
- 22:21They're all sitting on little legs.
- 22:22It's a very European style design rather than being mounted with a kick plate right to the floor.
- 22:27I'm sure it's hard to dust under the center of that giant island, but at the same time, the whole thing feels very light and floaty and again rests nicely inside the house.
- 22:37That's a choice that you could borrow.
- 22:39The material palette is a choice you could borrow.
- 22:41The suspended ceiling is an interesting choice to borrow.
- 22:45But you're not going to copy and paste this.
- 22:48You're not going to um translate this one-to-one from that house to yours.
- 22:55And when you look up the Stall House online, you'll see a lot of people criticizing it, talking about how weird the bedroom designs are or how they don't like this kitchen.
- 23:04It feels too open.
- 23:05One of the reasons I love it so much is how odd some of the choices are, how specifically they were made for the site and for the family that lived there.
- 23:15It blends very much with my personality and my approach to remodel design, which is very informed by the needs of people who will use it and the existing conditions of the house itself.
- 23:25I can't, I won't take on hypothetical design projects.
- 23:29People have asked me in the past if I would do a design project speculatively for a house they're planning to sell.
- 23:35And my answer is always absolutely not.
- 23:37I don't know what features, what sociability, what conveniences would be prioritized by the next owners.
- 23:45I can't design something that will work for someone I've not met.
- 23:48And I don't want something to be built into the house that will then rub the future owners the wrong way and be torn out and thrown away in the next five years.
- 23:54Similarly, people sometimes ask if I could design them a new mid-century style home, a new build.
- 24:00And I could know everything about them, but personally I don't enjoy starting from scratch.
- 24:06I like constraints.
- 24:07I like complications.
- 24:09So what makes this house so great is how specific it is to the constraints of its very weird site, and it's apparently quite creative, unusual family.
- 24:21It is the freedom that you can find in constraints that Pierre Candid work with that make this house iconic today.
- 24:29It's not that it's bland and unobjectionable and inoffensive in this sort of HGTV Zillow makeover flipper way, because it is not.
- 24:38And it's not because it's universal and easy fit for every space and every family, because it isn't.
- 24:44It could not be dropped into any neighborhood in America.
- 24:46This design would not work in a place where your neighbors were too close.
- 24:50This design also required the work of a structural engineer to set it up with steel beams and concrete pillars that support it over the cliff.
- 24:59Architect Pierre Koenig worked in detail with a structural engineer on this, in this case, William Poruch.
- 25:04He partnered with structural engineers throughout his career to set up the complicated steel and glass designs that he put up, that he put together.
- 25:14So we still see the Julius Schulman photo shoot images of this house today.
- 25:21We still know the name Stall House.
- 25:24Um, we still think about this kitchen today because of how uniquely and specifically fit it is to its original design brief.
- 25:31And that I think is maybe the most important takeaway.
- 25:36But also this really cool open plan glassed in island design kitchen is really, really cool.
- 25:43Is really, really, really, really cool.
- 25:45So um I'm gonna link out to some places where you can check out that amazing Julia Shulman photo shoot.
- 25:53I don't know that, I mean, you can also see snaps that tourists have taken in more recent years, see them in modern color, but uh no one's really documented it better than he did.
- 26:02And I'll have some fun little sketching around that I will do in my free time between now and the time of airing for this episode.
- 26:09But what I really want you to think as we wrap up the kitchen season is how can you end up with a kitchen that feels like the centerpiece of your home?
- 26:19It doesn't necessarily need to be filled with the most beautiful, expensive, high-end materials, but the specificity of the choices you make, the care that you take with them, the amount that you honor what was originally in your house, or choose to modify it because it was never really doing the most important bold thing.
- 26:38Let's get inspired by a crazy cool building like the Stall House.
- 26:42And by the way, if you want to see it show up in modern lights, this house is so cool and so interesting that has been featured in multiple movies.
- 26:53The first one just a few years after it was built, um, Smog from 1962.
- 26:58Uh things I recognize are Karina Karina, Playing by Heart, Galaxy Quest.
- 27:03It was in an episode of Columbo.
- 27:05Um, I'll put a link to all of those things from the Wikipedia page also into the show notes page.
- 27:12But that's gonna be it for today.
- 27:15Go check out all of that at midmod-midwest.com slash 2407.
- 27:20And don't forget to look out for the birthday sale.
- 27:24This is your big opportunity to jump into Ready to Remodel at a huge discount.
- 27:28Won't come around again until next year, when it will be, of course, 1% a better discount, but still, don't wait.
- 27:34And if you've been thinking about getting in touch, wanting to work with MidMod Midwest on a master plan for your house, reach out now before we shut down for the summer and before we get any more booked out.
- 27:45I'll be back on July 16th with another season of the Mid Mod Rodel podcast.
- 27:50And until then, have a great early summer.