The reason we built a house was, truth be told, because we wanted to build a kitchen. No house that we looked at with a view to buying, over the course of the last few years since we moved to west Cork, had the kitchen as the centre of the house, an ideal which we believed was not merely desirable, but logical.
In many houses, the link between cooking and eating is sundered, with food arriving out of a space which is rendered antisocial due to its isolation, and often delivered to a space which acts only as a place in which to eat, having no other function. In addition, we had never seen a house where a large library of cookery books could be proximate to both an office and a kitchen. We felt we needed all these things, and wanted some more.
We wanted our kitchen to function as a test kitchen for work which appears in The Irish Times and Estragon Press, our publishing company. Some sort of nostalgic idealism also wanted a place suitable for the kids to do their homework, a space which was an ally to our office, a room to feed the family, a place to chat and have a cup of coffee, a place to entertain friends, a place equally suitable for cheerful late breakfasts and candlelit dinners, a place to read and research cookery books, and to read the daily paper.
A place, in other words, where we would spend much of our waking moments. One of our first requests to our architect, Tom Hegarty, was that in order to achieve this multi-functionality, along with all the accoutrements of the domestic kitchen, we also wanted a comfortable chair in the room and, like the rest of the house, we wanted as much natural light as possible. We also wanted reasonable access to a garden for herbs.
We quickly realised, then, as dialogue with the architect developed, and as Tom Hegarty translated our dreams and desires into realities which combined practicality with aestheticism, that we needed not only a kitchen, but also a pantry with a larder cupboard, because we wanted to store wine and to mature farmhouse cheese. And because the washing machine was banished from the kitchen, we needed a utility room too.
When we came to design the kitchen, we wrote down all the aspects which, for us, make up a kitchen. Our biggest priority was the area of work surface, and even though most kitchens have a reasonable amount of surface to begin with, once you start installing and displaying kitchen gadgets, we realised this space is very quickly absorbed.
And so, we duly made a list of all our everyday equipment - orange juicer, espresso machine, Kitchenaid, food processor, kettle, toaster, ice-cream machine - and we began to see chopping board inches disappearing under a sea of gadgets. In fact, of all these things, the only items we now keep out are the toaster, Kitchenaid and espresso machine.
These are given space because they are aesthetically pleasing - the Dualit toaster and Kitchenaid mixer have never been changed or improved in their long histories - and the espresso machine provides our most essential narcotic.
Everything else is consigned to the nearby larder, and brought out when needed.
So, for this reason, Tom Hegarty suggested we follow the lead of the professional kitchen, keeping all equipment, fridges, ovens and cupboards at a low level to give us the maximum amount of space in which to work. Storage is achieved by virtue of a large plate-rack, open shelving for dishes and casseroles (the shelving also slides out for easier access), a few closed cupboards for saucepans and miscellaneous items, and a small cupboard built into the wall, in which all our basic, everyday ingredients for cooking - sugar, coffee, olive oil, salt and pepper, bread - are kept. Flours, nuts, spices, condiments and all the exotic paraphernalia of cooking are kept in the pantry, while cleaners, washing powders, tin foil, cling-wrap and freezer bowls, are stored in the utility room.
The next important area to consider was the question of rubbish, recycling and compost. We consigned this whole, often vexed, subject to an area underneath a second sink, which we hoped would allow us to deal with waste in all its forms.
We placed this sink between the working area and the dishwasher, incorporated a chute for a compost bin underneath, and this is where we temporarily keep glass bottles for recycling as well as our kitchen bin - all out of sight. We opted for a spraying hose tap, an beautiful extendable Vola, which could both lightly wash salad leaves and vegetables or blast debris from used dishes before they are placed in the adjacent dishwasher.
This left the kitchen relatively free to work in. And because we only bring out the ingredients we need for a particular dish, the kitchen has the atmosphere of a stage set, which makes the cooking of a particular dish both somewhat easier, and more exciting.
The next subject to look at was the machinery of the kitchen itself. Like most people these days, we cook in the modern magpie-cosmopolitan style. Even within the context of a single meal, the various dishes may call for stir-frying, grilling, steaming, roasting and baking, so we wanted machinery to be able to achieve these aims.
We flirted, very early on, with the idea of an Aga, but aside from the expense we decided that Agas are too authoritarian - you have to do things their way - and anyway, we decided what we really wanted was heat: speedy, controllable, powerful. This meant having gas hobs - but we wanted electric ovens. We became hooked on having an indoor barbecue, even though the expense is, unfortunately, pretty wild. We debated about a wok hob, and would reckon now, after a few months in the house, that it was almost our best purchase.
I would now say that both a barbecue and a wok hob are not just desirable in a modern kitchen, but almost essential, because they give you better control and flexibility, something which an array of more- or less-powerful gas hobs can't do.
We looked at French ovens and admired their delicacy, but dismissed them because their design was too fussy. Choosing the Italian-made Smeg ovens was made easy for us, by virtue of testing and photographing the recipes contained in Bernadette O'Shea's cookery book, Pizza Defined, which we published last year.
One day, during the photo-shoot, O'Shea kept her Smeg oven running at maximum temperature for 14 hours, non-stop, and it never blinked at enduring such a marathon. Having two ovens is simply a professional indulgence, necessary at certain times for testing recipes.
Germany provided the hobs for grilling and general cooking - a trio of Gaggenau units, which we admired as much for design as utility, after seeing them in chef Robbie Millar's kitchen. We like Smeg because it is clean and modern, with no frills, Gaggenau because in terms of aesthetics and power it falls somewhere between the domestic and professional kitchen.
Using barbecues and woks, and considering the central location of the kitchen in an open-plan house, meant we had to take the question of extraction very seriously, opting for a Gaggenau hood both over the cooking area and beside the barbecue, where a down-draft is used to suck out the smoke.
The idea of building the kitchen into a curving wall was Tom Hegarty's, as was the decision that the wall would not go all the way up to the ceiling, and would have Lucy lights (made by Erco) implanted into the top of the wall. After much to-ing and fro-ing, and time spent considering the relationship between the appliances and the question of the famous "triangle" of preparing, cooking and washing-up areas - we opted for the cooking area to run between the fridge and the main sink.
The area of waste disposal and washing-up was set outside of the triangle, and near to the eating area, so that dirty dishes didn't come back and crowd the hub of the cooking area. We opted for surfaces that were easy to clean, and chose a wooden floor, because we feel it is hygienic as well as attractive. Then we - or rather Tom Hegarty and John Shepherd - began to work on the design.
John Shepherd is a maker of one-off wooden furniture and he made the butcher's block in the centre of the kitchen. In fact, he even ended up making the kitchen wall.
Shepherd's speciality is working in native hard woods, so the basic of the kitchen was to be sycamore, for its mother-of-pearl richness, and beech, for its fitness for purpose. For the chopping area and around the sink, John suggested teak (or iroko as modern teak is) because of its ability to repel water. John and Tom together pared down the design to its basic form, and chose stainless steel for handles and hinges. John worked with kitchen-maker Ron Bending, whose area of expertise covers the housing of appliances as well as expert joinery.
For contrast, we wanted some granite in there too, to surround the waste sink area, and also French farmhouse sinks. And, most important of all, we wanted a large area of stainless steel around the cooking area, to mimic the professional kitchen.
This, the splash-backs, and the covering over of the doors of the fridge, freezer and dishwasher, were made for us by Jonathan Jennings, of Clonakilty.
This recitation of decisions probably makes the business of building a house and a kitchen seem like nothing but lots of fun, which it was - however, there are some pitfalls to assembling a kitchen in this way. Because we had gone for an a la carte kitchen, we found at the end that the whole area of installation of the appliances had been overlooked. This was fine for the electrics, where all it took was an electrician to wire things up. But for the Gaggenau gas hobs, this was another kettle of fish altogether.
Having a supplier and kitchenmakers was, we thought, enough to get us going, but Gaggenau hobs are a bit like a Ferrari: one step out of alignment and nothing works properly. Luckily the cavalry came in the form of Appliance Care, Gaggenau's service agent, which sent a bright spark down from Dublin and we were up and ready to go.
And how, then, after years of talk and discussion about it, does our kitchen work in practice? Very well, we think, with lots of light, lots of space, and with an array of appliances which do just what we hoped they would do. The Smeg ovens are, I think, amazing, combining true power and consistency, and their prices are incredibly reasonable. The extra culinary capabilities with which the wok hob and the barbecue grill gift the cook make them a thrill to use. And the interplay between the cooking and eating areas seems to us to be easy and logical.
The first person to see the curving wall of the kitchen in situ, as the house was nearing completion, descibed it as being "like an arm giving you a big hug", and this sort of effect is just one example of Tom Hegarty's ability to solve a practical problem with a brilliant aesthetic solution. Our house is the first private house he has built from soup-to-nuts, and his architectural abilities have amazed me.
We were fortunate, also, to have as our builders Tim and Frank Collins, of Skibbereen, a family firm whose application and skills relished the challenge of building a fairly unconventional house. It has been the adventure of a lifetime, seeing the house arise out of a field overlooking Durrus village and Dunmanus Bay, over the period of nine months which it took to build. It feels like an extraordinary privilege to be able to live here and, of course, to cook here.
The Right Ingredients
Tom Hegarty of O'Riordan Staehli Associates, Architects and Project Managers, Schoolhouse Studio, Douglas, Cork.
Tim and Frank Collins, Builders, Skibbereen, Co Cork. Tel: 028-22232
John Shepherd, Rineen, Co Cork. Tel: 028-36218
Ron Bending, Cappa, Co Waterford. Tel: 058-68294
Kitchen Flair (suppliers of Gaggenau hobs, Taps and Sinks), 6 Seafort Avenue, Sandymount, Dublin 4. Tel: 01-2695370 Appliance Care Ltd, (Gaggenau Service Agents) Dublin. Tel: 01-4502655
Oak Tree Marketing, (suppliers of Smeg) Unit C5, Edenderry Industrial Estate, Crumlin Road, Belfast. Tel: 08 01232 351103
Jennings Engineering, Ring Road, Clonakilty, Co Cork. Tel: 023-33331
Paints by Farrow and Ball, MRCB, 12-13 Cornmarket, Dublin 8. Tel: 01679 8755