Imagine a cast-iron kettle simmering on a wood stove, aromatic herbs hanging from a ceiling beam to dry, a sink brimming with the morning's asparagus harvest, the window above it flung open to the fresh country air. Are memories of grandma's kitchen shimmering in your mind's eye?
Welcome to a classic country kitchen. With the exception of maybe the wood stove, you will find these and other countrified features cropping up in urban kitchens as well, but the originals belong to the homesteads of our rural ancestors.
When you find similar features in the city, they'll often be a homeowner's attempt to imbue their little piece of urban jungle with comforting elements from a less-complicated past or a treasured weekend retreat.
Most of us are familiar with the typical North American country style — think farmhouse kitchens big enough to hold long harvest tables with simply turned painted legs and "colonial" wooden ladder-back chairs, sometimes with rush seats. You may also be envisioning gingham check fabrics and duck decoys à la Little House on the Prairie. Country style is actually richer and more varied if you look closely.
The look, such as the finish and style of cabinetry, is less sleek and refined than many found in urban kitchens. This country kitchen was designed by Sarah Richardson. (Donna Griffith Photography)
The influx of immigrants to Canada has brought influences from far-flung homelands. Style and functional essentials that originated in Britain, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy are only a few that add spice and texture to many of today's Canadian country kitchen.
For example, comb-backed Windsor chairs pulled close to the warmth of an Aga range are ubiquitous to the English country cottage. A wall-hung wire cage (panetière) filled with baguettes, a slope-lidded and hinged salt box (salière), and the traditional kitchen armoire are borrowed from the French.
Rustic tiles in burnt sienna, earthy ochre and terracotta paired with generous blocks of lavender grey-blue and thyme green bring us the rural hues of Tuscany and Umbria. Lidded clay urns intended for curing goat's cheese in olive oil are evocative of Spain and Portugal. Such appealing influences from abroad add richness and flavour to the North American country kitchen.
Consider also the differences between country and urban kitchens. From a designer's perspective, they are distinct and layered. Immediately obvious are the aesthetic qualities — what you see on the surface, such as the finish and style of cabinetry — but to a great extent the look of any space is driven by functional requirements.
And, less obvious but just as important are the deeply seated emotional and psychological needs of the kitchen's key users.
These needs can become magnified when a designer takes clients through the "programming" stage of a project. Programming is a component of the design process where the client answers detailed questions about how family members use the kitchen, how they entertain, what their daily routines are as a family and as individuals, what their personal styles are, and how an existing space does or does not support all the activities that take place in and around the kitchen.
Going through this process with both city dwellers and those renovating country kitchens is revealing.
The levels of difference are often most profound when the homeowner has both a city and country home.
In those instances, how differently the disparate kitchen spaces they live with are used, viewed and enjoyed can be significant.
Simply put, people use and live in their country kitchens differently than they do in the city. It's little wonder. Give the slip to traffic woes and the sheer pounding rhythm of city living and the meter of your life changes. When people return to the country they return to basics. Simple activities that can be anything but simple in the city, like taking a family meal together in mid-week, become daily pleasures. The down-to-earth becomes the rule, from fresh produce purchased at a roadside stand to the honest, hardworking materials that make up their rural kitchens.
Often those materials will have served well for generations, bearing irreplaceable memories. Even if they don't, they will be less sleek and refined than many found in urban kitchens, where design can sometimes focus on the space's ability to impress outsiders.
As you make your way from urban to rural environment — and these are just generalizations but serve to make my point — polished granite or marble and stainless-steel countertops will make room for cheerful ceramic tile and utilitarian butcher block. Floors will be wide-plank pine or oak that is either painted or stained and often worn down in front of sink and stove. Glossy exotic hardwoods will be as scarce as fancy French petits fours at a church picnic.
The country kitchen is a special place with singular powers.
It nourishes our elemental human needs and allows pretensions to dissipate along with the haze of smog left behind in the city. It feeds our souls in a way little else can.
Special to The Globe and Mail
