Kitchens: A Design Source Book

I take this book off the shelf all the time to skim it for new ideas (someday I'll actually undertake my renovation, I hope). Every time I read it I see something I hadn't noticed before. I love the variety of kitchens in this book--very modern, very retro, very traditional. There are tons of colors, tons of kinds of photographs. I also love that many of the kitchens are not perfect--there are funky, home-made countertops, old floors, jumbles of utensils, and so on. It's refreshing in the face of so many books and magazines that assume that everyone wants a perfect, "new" looking kitchen with top-of-the-line everything. A lot of the kitchens appear to be European, which I appreciate because I think a lot of them use space in ways that American kitchens do not.

I enjoyed the other book in the series, so I assumed this would be a delight as well. I am so glad that I decided to buy this! Wonderful detail and full of great ideas, this gets the creative juices flowing! Kitchens is a great buy.

After reading this book you'll realize that, gone are the old notions that a kitchen is the place where June Cleaver baked cookies for The Beaver, Wally, and the omnipresent Eddie Haskell! The kitchen has now become a showcase of sleek design and gleaming stainless steel, and YES you CAN cook in it! This book is full of ideas for designing your kitchen and using available space to maximum advantage without sacrificing beauty. From the traditional to the contemporary kitchen you will find many excellent ideas, and it will broaden your horizons about what can be used in a kitchen. Imagine having a set of chairs by: Charles Eames, Alvar Aalto and Marcel Brever sitting side by side while the Dualit grills your sandwich!

This is indeed a source book. The appendix is well filled out. The four main sections of the book, Principles, Style, Equipment and Decoration lead the reader in a logical path through kitchen design concepts. Each superb photograph focuses on the feature under discussion. The many unusual and clever ideas in this book are going to help me in my discussions with my designer.