Now THAT's a kitchen!

I have a reasonably nice kitchen. Nothing too elaborate. No chef's dream. No 6-burner gas stove. No double ovens. No eat-in (unless I'm standing over the sink.) It's a city, galley kitchen. But it's very nice (albeit a tiny bit messy: I'm too lazy to "stage" it for a photo op), and it suits me just fine.

As with most of my home, it's highly personal. The dutch oven on the stove top, the dishtowel hanging to the right on the oven: gifts from my sister Kath. The tiles over the stove were a 60th birthday gift from some friends. The blue bowls on the window sill came from my sister Trish. The dishtowel to the left: my niece Molly brought it back for me from her semester abroad in Ireland. You can't see what's hanging to the left on the wall there, but it's a cool photo of the Fenway Park bleachers, given to me by my niece Caroline. Also out of sight, over the sink hangs a goofy framed embroidered dishtowel I made when I was a crafty seven year old.

Other than the dishtowel, nothing too weird. Your standard gray and white kitchen with some pops of color, as they say on HGTV. I think it will age okay.

On the other hand, there are kitchen designs that don't age well at all:

My sister Kath and her husband are looking at property in Phoenix and this one crossed their path. The place is spectacularly located, with fabulous views, but the entire thing is covered on the inside with some rather hideous wallpaper. Certainly over the top by today's standards and aesthetics. But having a wallpapered ceiling? In the kitchen? Yuck, yuck, a thousand times yuck.

But the best kitchen I've seen lately has to be this kitchen of the future that popped up in my Twitter feed. (I think it was from historian Michael Beschloss, who regularly tweets out archived photos from the Library of Congress.)

This is a late 1950's kitchen of the future - the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen that was one of three exhibit kitchens that were at the scene of the famous Nixon-Khrushchev debate about the merits of American capitalism vs. Soviet communism. Advantage: American housewives. Da!

RCA Whirlpool was definitely anticipating the robotic future. 

"In this kitchen you can bake a cake in three minutes, and in this kitchen the dishes are scraped, washed and dried electronically. They even put themselves away. Even the floor is cleaned electronically. So welcome to this wonderful new world of push-button cooking, cleaning and homemaking." (Source: Indyweek article by Tom Maxwell, whose father was one of the Miracle Kitchen designers)

That thing that looks like a cool little mid-century modern TV is the command center, from which the housewife of the future can control everything from her nicely manicured fingertips.

Being able to have everything done for you automatically apparently gave the housewife of the future plenty of time to line up her pantry items - I see that there's little scratch cooking or baking going on at her house - on the slant. I may take this approach up.

Even though I don't have a command center in my kitchen, I think I'll keep mine over this futurized version. But I'd take the Miracle Kitchen over the Tucson wallpaper-ama any old day. Even if I had to sit around it in an aqua colored, polished cotton dress. (Which, I will note, would nicely match my kitchen color scheme.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

If you have a bit of time, I highly recommend this video in which the spokesmodel walks you through all the goodies that the Miracle Kitchen - including a feature that anticipates checking out who's at the door via Ring-like technology, and an early version of Roomba - will have to offer. Whirlpool sure missed a market opportunity by not pursuing products like these, that's for sure.