Home Ergonomics

“The kitchen proper was our major concern, because, to us, it is the beating heart and social center of the household,” chef, television star, and gourmand Julia Child once told Architectural Digest. “We intended to make it both practical and beautiful, a working laboratory as well as a living and dining room.”

For a certain generation of Americans, Julia Child was not only a household name, but a teacher and cultural ambassador for a kind of culinary art de vivre: an ambitious, insouciant, and decidedly roll-up-your sleeves attitude that extended from the butcher’s block to the dinner table.

“The harder the utensils are to see, the less you will use them,” Stumpf wrote, noting Julia’s method of displaying items to maximize visibility, rather than tidily tucking them away to be forgotten in a drawer. Whole groups of tools, sorted and arranged by type, were placed near the appliances or workstations where they would be used the most—knives above the sink, and pots and pans within arm’s reach of the stove. Stumpf admired Child’s extensive collection of cookware, which he read not only as a sign of ebullient connoisseurship, but a continued investment in her own craft and an enthusiasm to impart it to others—all in an era when spending more time in the kitchen was not necessarily a popular notion.

At the center of Julia’s kitchen was a sizable table where the Childs would work, dine, and host visitors. “The first impression is more social than culinary or technical,” Stumpf observed, noting the kitchen’s back door, through which a panoply of friends, guests, and students would enter, all but made the front door ornamental.

Her own dance about the kitchen, of course, was central to its layout and design. As her grand-nephew and biographer, Alex Prud’homme, put it: “Julia didn’t care about establishing the ‘golden triangle,’—a configuration allowing a cook to take as few steps as possible among the stove, refrigerator, and sink—declaring in typical fashion, ‘the more exercise the better.’ But she was adamant that she have as much ‘working and putting-down space as possible.’”

Illuminating the space was a trio of ceiling spotlights, wall swivels, and strip lights, “so placed that the cook’s hands cast no shadows,” as a New York Times Magazine article detailed. And the kitchen telephone, made for multi-tasking across the substantial workspace, naturally boasted an extra-long cord. That frequently gabbed-upon receiver now lives, along with the entirety of the main kitchen space, in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, to which Child donated the room in 2001.

“It’s ironic to think of the postwar housewife and her family perhaps sitting down with TV dinners to watch Julia Child, but I think that’s the heart of it,” muses curator Juliet Kinchin, who organized Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. “Julia was sharing a different way of being modern and reengaging with this idea of the sensual and sensory pleasures of working with food, really pioneering ideas of slow food, as well as nutritional approaches to food. She embodies that sense of pleasure in the whole process.”