Customer Reviews

MOTION-MINDED KITCHEN

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I used this book to design the kitchen of my owner-designed and built house fifteen years ago. I love my kitchen! Unlike other books about designing kitchens--which are by far the hardest rooms in any house to design--it gets down to the very basic challenges of a kitchen, instead of how to make a kitchen your visitors will ooh and aah over. Clark uses the motion-study techniques pioneered by the Gilbreths in the first half of this century to analyse efficiency in the kitchen. If you are the kind of person who wants to know how to make a kitchen that really works well, as opposed to looks pretty, this is your book. If you want a lot of gorgeous pictures of very expensive kitchens, find another book. This is for people with little money and a lot of practicality.

This is an excellent guide to planning and designing a functional kitchen, most useful for those who spend a lot of time cooking. The photos, decorations, and cabinetry displayed are outdated, but the focus is on kitchen design for practical uses. We relied heavily on the author's principles in bulding a kitchen (in 1992) for our 1906 home, and we've been quite happy. Sections on building cabinets & drawers are interesting but not as well done as some more recent publications.

This book helped us redesign out kitchen to be much more efficient and a joy to work in. Definitely the best home design book I've seen.

I used this book in 1989 to totally remodel our kitchen in a 1916 townhouse. I'm a serious cook, and I count myself so lucky to have stumbled upon Sam Clark's marvelous ideas. His cabinet designs (especially using ALL drawers below counter height), the Scandinavian style dish drainer, the kitchen sill knife rack, etc. are wonderful. I'd urge anyone remodeling or building a new kitchen to buy a used copy of this out-of-print book. The photos are in black and white but the advice and ideas are worth their weight in gold.

I addition, buy his current book, Building Like A Pro: Remodeling a Kitchen, 2003. These are all described on his web site.

We're midway in a kitchen designing project when a friend loaned me this book. I'm considering buying a used copy since it's now out of print.
Chapter-wise, there's an introduction to the idea that modern kitchens are too standardized and glamorized to be well-matched to the needs of the cook, and the idea of customizing the kitchen to personal use patterns, as well as a discussion of realistic average patterns. There's a chapter talking about fitting the kitchen with the layout of the house as a whole, as well as a chapter focusing on where to put different task areas within a given kitchen. Interesting discussion of choosing where things are stored affects the functionality of the kitchen as much as the layout choices of where the appliances go. Nice ideas about comparing layouts using a string to map your walk between stations while doing various tasks.
Also practical chapters on budgeting money and time for your project, and how to hire help, though this is partly outdated.
Because he's all about customizing the kitchen to the space, there are 2-3 carpentry chapters on cabinet design (door/drawer size choices), in-place cabinet construction (using the room walls and neighboring cabinets as sides/back instead of lots of freestanding Nx24x36 boxes), as well as an appendix on a simple home woodshop to do this in.
Another appendix deals with efficiency studies, motions used in food preparation and cleanup, etc. The author often refers to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's efficient design principles - meaning that as a fan of Cheaper by the Dozen, I found Clark's design advice even more appealing.

All around, somebody would have to be very inspired by this design philosophy to need every chapter of this book, but even knowing I'm not interested in some of his ideas (I'm so buying ready-made cabinets, and I'm not into open shelving) there are some great ideas about how to make a kitchen very useable. While the book encourages me to ignore some "rules" of standard modern design as I make my kitchen flow logically for me, the same "do what suits you" principle argues that I can ignore Clark, too, if I decide that's best. Take what you need and leave the rest, but it's all a good read.