Our kitchen lives are changing for aesthetic and green reasons. I wonder if meat safes will make a comebackAs usual, I was procrastinating, putting off the moment when I settled down to write, by browsing property porn – and that’s when I found it: my dream barn. Oh, it was everything I ever wanted. In just the right part of the Yorkshire Dales, and with uninterrupted views to the Lake District, some deft person had made it over with utmost care. I liked the bedrooms, and the bathroom; I adored the garden, with its cast iron water butt at the back door. But most of all I loved the kitchen, which consisted only of a huge stove and a couple of waist-high cabinets on casters, to move as and when the fancy takes.Is the fitted kitchen on its way out at last? I’m beginning to think that it might be. As the rental market swells, space inside coming at an ever greater premium, and we grow more concerned both about waste and the politics of owning stuff more generally, the fashion for massed ranks of gleaming cupboards is rapidly diminishing – one symptom of which is a similar reduction in our hunger to own kitchen kit. Companies that rent out slow cookers and bread-makers, pasta machines and food processors, report rising numbers of clients, and no wonder. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity that campaigns to cut waste by keeping products in use, 80% of household items are used less than once a month. The cost of lockdown “regret purchases” is said to stand at £6bn. Continue reading…
Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Worried about waste and too much ‘stuff’? Get rid of fitted kitchens
