Why Do Outdated Kitchens Feel So Wrong?

Designed for an earlier time, when servants were common and women had few freedoms, old kitchens remind us of a culture most of us don’t want to revisit.

I’ve been house hunting lately, walking through a lot of homes built between 1970 and 1990, which fall in my price range, although I’d add that most are about $100,000 overpriced, based on what you’re getting. A ranch-style, poorly insulated 1,500 square-foot home with a 10-year-old roof, a 15-year-old HVAC, and a dated kitchen is not a $350,000 product. It’s a rip off.

But worst of all, in these often weirdly designed old homes are the kitchens. At best, they’ve been “remuddled” with slots and openings, like a short order kitchen, to try to bring them forward into this age of open floorplans. 

At worst, they’re isolated cubbies, described by writer Kate Whiston as “a food preparation area for the confinement of women” where whoever gets stuck with the cooking has to wave at the family from their little workstation.

In the idealized past, women happily slaved away in their kitchens while the rest of the family did its own thing. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Indoctrination From the Idiot Box

Thinking back to the popular TV shows of the boomer generation, we were all indoctrinated to accept the family home “flow” in a certain way. From Leave it to Beaver and The Dick Van Dyke Show, all the way through Good Times and All in the Family, the special narrative followed a similar script:  Everyone but the women doing the cooking expected to be served. They sat down at the table at the end of the day, surrounded by well-behaved children, while the wife (or nanny) slaved away in some hidden room, emerging with steaming piles of meatloaf and pot roast.

Look around Zillow for a reasonably priced resale home. The wife-as-servant  narrative literally jumps out,  if the kitchen hasn’t been FULLY upgraded. Few upgrades go far enough. Owners try to fix a mortal wound with a Bandaid and don’t erase the oppressive vibe of the original plan.

And weirdly, the “what happens in the kitchen …” meme continues even in the most modern cultural venues. In Larry David’s brilliantly written Curb Your Enthusiasm TV series, for example, dinner parties typically separate the kitchen and food preparation from the interesting and worldly part of the evening—people sitting around talking and making snide comments.

Cutting through a kitchen wall to open it to living areas slightly improves the “kitchen servant” vibe but doesn’t really fix the problem. Source: Zillow

Plan for Serious Renovation or Build New

If old kitchens give you the creeps, then you’re normal. They reflect a world where women did not have careers, often did not go to college, and were not treated as equals.

Almost nobody (with the possible exception of J.D. Vance and his crew) wants to go back there. And we don’t want our homes to suggest that we do.

If you’re buying a home with this problem, remuddling to try to erase the architectural blight won’t cure it.  Instead, budget adequately to tear it out and make it right, or don’t buy the house. I can think of few old house issues that make a better case for having a new home built instead. 

You’re likely to find variations on this patriarchal theme even in more recently built homes. For example, I’ve seen  “modern” floorplans from the 1980s and 1990s where the builder put the kitchen in a bizarre short-walled central location in the home, but closed off the island with upper wall cabinets.  I have a friend who lives in one of these monstrosities. She has to constantly duck around the corner to find out what her three young children are destroying in the living room.

What’s a Modern Kitchen?

A modern kitchen is open to the rest of the home. It connects food preparation with daily life. It allows parents to commune with kids, provides a space for serious conversations and education of family members, and a place to chat with guests as food is shared. It’s also a “statement” about who calls the shots in the family hierarchy. For most of us, decisions are shared, as are our chores and household “duties,” not dictated to our spouse or partner. Our kitchens should reflect that.

We tend to romanticize the old kitchens of the 1960s and 1970s, but they’re completely dysfunctional for how we live today. Source: AI (fantasy)

Publisher’s Note: This content is made possible by our Today’s Homeowner Campaign Sponsors: Whirlpool Corporation. Whirlpool Corporation takes sustainability seriously, in both their products and their operations. Learn more about building and buying homes that are more affordable and less resource intensive.