
The big little lie of the TV kitchen island - pshaw
https://www.curbed.com/2019/8/1/20747174/big-little-lies-houses-set-design
======
anm89
"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated
dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen,
centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-
saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform."

I gave up here. This is so stupid that I'm not sure what is the premise that I
should critique.

Also Im a guy who cooks in a kitchen with an island and I love it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
There's an excellent book about the history of domestic technology called
"More work for mother." It details how the more domestic tech we created, the
more work shifted from the man of the house to the lady of the house and
standards were raised

Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework.
Today, with all our modern appliances, they still do about 60 hours/week of
housework.

In most families, as women begin working outside the home, they still do 40
hours/week of housework. The men mostly have not picked up the difference.

I'm a former homemaker. I got divorced and got a corporate job. My adult
special needs sons continued to live with me.

Co-workers would express pity anout how I worked full-time and _also had to go
home and cook dinner._ They were flabbergasted to learn my oldest son did the
cooking.

Given that I was working at a Fortune 200 company, these were presumably some
of the most privileged "ordinary" women on the planet. Even the highest
ranking woman in my department whose husband moved to let her accept the
promotion was not comfortable learning about my arrangement at home because
she apparently still did most of the _women 's work_ at home while having a
VIP job.

~~~
IshKebab
60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work
every single day? Yeah, no.

~~~
anon4242
I guess you have some solid data to support that statement?

I unfortunately only have anecdotal evidence that 60h is not implausible.

Me and my wife have two kids and share most of the household work, it's not an
even split (she does more). I would say that on average we both work from the
time we get back home from work until the kids sleep, ~4hrs later. In addition
to that, one of us probably spends some 30 mins each morning getting the kids
ready for school. Saturdays and Sundays typically involve two cooked meals per
day plus any bigger household work that the weekdays won't fit. So I guess we
spend some 60h/week on chores.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Are we counting all time spent with children as a chore?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a father of two. Like you, our work is not split
evenly, though I like to think I take on a higher share than most similarly
situated men. There are times when my time with my sons can be trying, and I
can get behind counting some fraction of that time as work.

On the other hand, just today my son and I spent three hours going to and from
a playdate with a friend of his. I'm also friends with the dad. It was a
pleasant time for all involved, and we got some sun and some exercise. This is
not an atypical way for us to spend a Sunday afternoon. If this is accounted
for as "work" then I would say the statistic is a bit misleading, as that is
not something most people I know would consider labor.

~~~
ljf
And I also had a 3 hour meeting today with co-workers that I enjoy working
with, solving a problem we all care about. That was work.

I'll be commuting home for an hour. That is work.

Tonight I'll be putting the kids to bed, then tidying up the kitchen. That is
also work.

I think it is fair to say, that as an adult with kids, much of your time that
you aren't doing something just for you, will to a degree be work. And that is
OK. As long as you and your partner are happy with the split you have, then
that is OK too.

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kop316
I read through this a couple of times, and I still can't figure out its point
beyond the idea that the author doesn't like kitchen islands/open floor plans,
and even that I'm not sure of?

I've found to really like open floor plans and an open kitchen. When I visit
my family, we tend to congregate in the kitchen as someone is cooking (or
several of us are cooking) and we don't want them to feel left out. An open
floor plan allows this.

When we go to someone's house that doesn't allow it, it tends to either a)
divide people who are cooking and people in the living room, or b) have
everyone in a small kitchen for socializing.

~~~
anm89
This article is a preference about interior design masquerading as a social
critique.

------
analog31
I'd love to have a kitchen island. Our house has a tiny kitchen, and everybody
congregates there, so it's impossible to do anything without people constantly
bumping into one another. I could say, "get out of the kitchen," but then I'm
separated from the conversation. Then, somebody wants a drink, or a snack, or
whatever, and they're all back in the kitchen again.

The island lets people socialize in the kitchen, which is where they want to
be, without getting in the way of the cook.

I don't care about being able to hide the mess. The rest of the house is a
mess.

------
ghobs91
"Over the decades, as versions of this housewife’s setup have eliminated
dining rooms, pass-throughs, and farmhouse tables, the open-concept kitchen,
centered around an island visible from all sides, has become not a labor-
saving device but a stage on which (mostly) women are forced to perform."

Or...it's a convenient place to assemble ingredients away from the stove/oven
area.

This is such an incredibly absurd reach I don't know where to begin. Yet
another example of trying to garner clicks and views with provocative
journalism.

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stonogo
This article is about a TV soap opera, and it might have been more obvious
(and saved me a click) had the submitter not pointlessly altered the
capitalization of the headline.

~~~
stuntkite
I read through the first quarter of it three times before I figured out that
it's a confusing advertisement for a TV show rather than a discussion on the
history of kitchen islands. I honestly couldn't find any useful information.
It reads like it was written by a plausibly seeded neural net.

------
brandonmenc
> As a portrait of modern family life, it is more than a little bleak—just
> like the show. The kitchen island is the new hearth, as the kitchen long ago
> replaced the living room as the center of the home.

Modern? Many families have elevated the kitchen to main room status for
generations.

------
whatshisface
Sitcom actors are always more attractive than normal people, and the sets they
act in are usually way up there in terms of what it would cost to actually buy
a house like that. It's because TV is aspiration with a little (a lot) of
consumerist guilt mixed in.

~~~
yardie
I think it has less to do with anting to be aspirational and a lot more to do
with how sets are decorated. Take an interior designer and give them an
unlimited budget with the only requirement being it has to look good on camera
and you’ll get amazing results every time. My house has bare walls because we
don’t have a professional decorator. And everything else is slapdashed
together because that is how real homes work.

Now logistics: you need space for cameras lighting and crew to move in. No way
in hell is a multi camera show going to be shot in a real New York apartment
kitchen. Walking through a real living room would have the camera operator
bumping into all sorts of things. So homes and sets are huge. They aren’t
filming bathroom confessionals.

~~~
goto11
In this case it is probably both. The show is about people with seemingly
perfect lives which (spoiler!) has dark secrets which threaten to disrupt
their lives. That kind of story just works better with beautiful perfect homes
etc. since that makes the contrast and threat stronger.

------
chiph
Kitchen islands can reach epic proportions. I had to drop off a check to my
realtor at another home where she was doing a open-house. The island in it had
to have been 200 square feet of dark granite.

You would need a rail network to pass the salt. Even if it housed every labor
saving device known to modern kitchen science, there still would have been
room left over inside.

~~~
onion2k
_You would need a rail network to pass the salt._

So... I'd need a train set in the kitchen? This is not a downside.

~~~
logfromblammo
All you need now is to get a lazy choochoo to replace the lazy susan in a show
on HBO, and all the homemaker spouses will want one!

------
goto11
Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV-show
Big Little Lies. If you don't know or care about the show, the article will
probably be of little interest to you.

HN seems to be interpreting the article as a general critique of open-plan
kitchens. Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about
mainstream TV-shows!

~~~
msla
> Hey everyone, before you comment: This article is a reviews of the HBO TV-
> show Big Little Lies.

Thank you. This was rather odd without context.

> Apparently HN cares a lot more about kitchen islands than about mainstream
> TV-shows!

HBO is mainstream, now? I thought it was premium. Super-duper-premium, maybe.

Ah well. I suppose in a land where Netflix can make its own movies, HBO is
positively _dowdy_.

------
ablation
That's a lot of words written about not a lot.

------
Merrill
A century ago most housewives were farm housewives. The housewife on a pre-
electric, pre-running water farm could not have spent 60 hours/week on what is
now "housework", since considerable time had to be devoted to caring for the
chickens; collecting and packing eggs; planting, weeding, harvesting the
garden; canning vegetables and fruits; helping with the milking; helping with
butchering chickens, pigs, and steers; etc.

On the other hand, multi-generational households were common, maiden-aunts
came to stay and help, and neighborhood girls could be hired when needed.
Neighboring housewives helped out when the threshing crew arrived and a dozen
hungry men had to be fed a good meal.

Baths were Saturday night and clothes were washed Mondays for the simple
reason that greater frequency was impractical, since water had to be carried
from the well and heated on the wood stove.

~~~
onion2k
_A century ago most housewives were farm housewives._

You believe that in 1919, at the end of the first world war, and just 10 years
before the Wall Street crash, most housewives lived on farms that didn't have
electricity or running water? The population of New York city in 1919 was a
little over _5.5 million people_.

~~~
bhandziuk
1919 is right on the cusp of when the US became majority urban.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics)

And those people living outside the cities were unlikely to have electricity
still

"by the 1920s electricity was not delivered by power companies to rural areas
because of the general belief that the infrastructure costs would not be
recouped"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#The_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#The_United_States_of_America)

I assume they did have some sort of running water in that they would have a
well.

------
rhino369
I hate open kitches and I really hate large islands that are sort of intended
to be used for eating at. They are not nearly as comfortable to eat at as a
table.

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TazeTSchnitzel
When the author mentioned the “messy kitchen” I thought it was a joke. Now I
realise, as a European, that American house design is just absurd form over
function. If you need a second, practical kitchen to deal with your main
kitchen not being usable for its ostensible purpose then something is horribly
wrong.

~~~
goto11
The idea of a "messy kitchen" certainly exist in Europe, see Scullery:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scullery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scullery)
It is not a new invention.

~~~
mcv
In NL we've got the "bijkeuken". Modern homes rarely have them, but old farm
houses almost always do.

Our new house incidentally does have one, which is indeed messy, and mostly
used to store kitchen equipment we rarely use, as well as all the kitchen
machinery, including the water kettle and coffee maker, that we don't want in
plain sight. Apart from making tea and coffee, we don't do any actual work
there, though. The real kitchen is still messy, because that's where the real
cooking happens.

