what's a system kitchen?
May. 5th, 2020 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lin_netI've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons lately. (I've also given myself a bad haircut, so I'm just ticking off the boxes on the quarantine list here.)
The other day an item turned up in my shop that interested me: a System Kitchen. It's immediately recognizable as the kind of kitchen unit you'd expect to find in a Japanese home, but I'd never heard the name "system kitchen" before so I thought I'd look it up, which turned out to take more digging than I'd anticipated. Most results were unhelpful: I got either results for restaurant kitchen systems, or a few scattered results for Japanese and Korean realty listings.
wiki problems
Digging a little turned up the English Wikipedia article for Japanese kitchens, which initially looked like exactly what I wanted! It includes these passages:
Which is cool, except that on closer inspection all of that is unsourced, the talk page and history seem a bit fraught, and there's no other English results I could find for some of those key points.
I flipped over to Japanese Wikipedia instead looking for better sources and made a tour through the kitchen page before ending up at the specific page for system kitchens. It turns out that . The Japanese is "システムキッチン" - so, it's just plain "system kitchen" in wasei-eigo. An alternative term appears to be "ユニットキッチン" - "unit kitchen". Apparently the Japanese system kitchen traces back to the Frankfurt kitchen, which was developed in the 1920s for effiency of space and cost, for use in new housing built in Germany post-WWI. It's interesting to view the Frankfurt kitchen and compare it to a system kitchen. A system kitchen is sort of the next step down in terms of module size- depending on model it can cover all the cabinetry, plumbing, and cooking surface for a kitchen, but it doesn't comprise the full room or space.
cool, let's look at some fancy kitchens
I also turned up a fair amount of advertising material from brands selling higher-end(?) system kitchens, and I think the difference in focus vs what I'm used to with fancy American kitchens is pretty neat to see. (Actually, I'm struggling to think of features I'd see prominently advertised for a fancy American kitchen, beyond being large enough to fit a car in. That thing where there's two ovens built into a wall?)
Here's a system kitchen from Takara Standard in English. A couple specific points I think are neat from this one:
This tiered boards system meant to slot into the sink so the sink can be used as a prep space. (Note the faucet placement- this is a side view.)
The fancy tiered drawers! Look at how many there are!
This model from Toto (in Japanese) also focuses heavily on how cool the cabinetry is and how much stuff you can pack into it. It sounds like these have the same kind of unslammable drawers I've seen mentioned occasionally. I wanna know how that works exactly - magnet bumpers? I like the section where they've gone through all the cabinets and sort of compiled a visual list of all the things you might fit into them, one by one.
The other day an item turned up in my shop that interested me: a System Kitchen. It's immediately recognizable as the kind of kitchen unit you'd expect to find in a Japanese home, but I'd never heard the name "system kitchen" before so I thought I'd look it up, which turned out to take more digging than I'd anticipated. Most results were unhelpful: I got either results for restaurant kitchen systems, or a few scattered results for Japanese and Korean realty listings.wiki problems
Digging a little turned up the English Wikipedia article for Japanese kitchens, which initially looked like exactly what I wanted! It includes these passages:
In 1922, Suzuki Shougyou began marketing a customizable kitchen set that came to be called the "System Kitchen." Many of its parts were prefabricated, and it could be made to fit in a space anywhere from 1.8 to 2.7 metres, the length of one to one-and-one-half tatami mats. The System Kitchen had a water sink, a cutting board, two or more gas stoves (not included), and cabinets for storage. This Suzuki kitchen was expensive, costing 120 yen at a time when a first-year bank worker earned only 50 yen per month. Today the same worker earns over 240,000 yen or about 2,400 dollars in a month.
[...]
The "System Kitchen" approach to design was intended to make the kitchen easier for the average housewife to use. Since most families cook many types of cuisine in their kitchens, a streamlined cooking process was studied, focusing on how the kitchen was actually used. In a system kitchen, the refrigerator and other electrical appliances were placed in predesigned locations, and storage spaces were subdivided to house pots, pans and kitchen utensils.
[...]
The "System Kitchen" approach to design was intended to make the kitchen easier for the average housewife to use. Since most families cook many types of cuisine in their kitchens, a streamlined cooking process was studied, focusing on how the kitchen was actually used. In a system kitchen, the refrigerator and other electrical appliances were placed in predesigned locations, and storage spaces were subdivided to house pots, pans and kitchen utensils.
Which is cool, except that on closer inspection all of that is unsourced, the talk page and history seem a bit fraught, and there's no other English results I could find for some of those key points.
I flipped over to Japanese Wikipedia instead looking for better sources and made a tour through the kitchen page before ending up at the specific page for system kitchens. It turns out that . The Japanese is "システムキッチン" - so, it's just plain "system kitchen" in wasei-eigo. An alternative term appears to be "ユニットキッチン" - "unit kitchen". Apparently the Japanese system kitchen traces back to the Frankfurt kitchen, which was developed in the 1920s for effiency of space and cost, for use in new housing built in Germany post-WWI. It's interesting to view the Frankfurt kitchen and compare it to a system kitchen. A system kitchen is sort of the next step down in terms of module size- depending on model it can cover all the cabinetry, plumbing, and cooking surface for a kitchen, but it doesn't comprise the full room or space.
cool, let's look at some fancy kitchens
I also turned up a fair amount of advertising material from brands selling higher-end(?) system kitchens, and I think the difference in focus vs what I'm used to with fancy American kitchens is pretty neat to see. (Actually, I'm struggling to think of features I'd see prominently advertised for a fancy American kitchen, beyond being large enough to fit a car in. That thing where there's two ovens built into a wall?)
Here's a system kitchen from Takara Standard in English. A couple specific points I think are neat from this one:
This tiered boards system meant to slot into the sink so the sink can be used as a prep space. (Note the faucet placement- this is a side view.)
The fancy tiered drawers! Look at how many there are!
This model from Toto (in Japanese) also focuses heavily on how cool the cabinetry is and how much stuff you can pack into it. It sounds like these have the same kind of unslammable drawers I've seen mentioned occasionally. I wanna know how that works exactly - magnet bumpers? I like the section where they've gone through all the cabinets and sort of compiled a visual list of all the things you might fit into them, one by one.
