Designer cooks up plans to make kitchens work
by Joe Mooney/The Seattle Post Intelligencer

WOODINVILLE — I've always thought that poet Emily Dickinson might have done well in the construction industry.

In a poem entitled "To Make a Prairie," she compiled what is easily my favorite list of building materials. The job should be done, she said with just "a clover, a bee and reverie."

Three things. But she hastened to make two of them optional by noting that "reverie alone will do if bees are few."

If everything in life were this simple, we wouldn’t need people like Susan Larsen. But reverie, alas, has its limitations.

When Saturday night bath time rolls around, for example, reverie alone will not take the worry out of being close. You need plumbing. You need a tub, a shower head, a sink, some storage space for toiletries, proper lighting, cabinets, some mirrors, ventilation — you need a plan. And Susan Larsen is one of the best planners in the country.

They don’t award Nobel prizes for bathrooms and kitchens, but among the prizes they do award Susan has either won, or seriously threatened to win, the most prestigious. Last year, for example, a bathroom she designed scored a near miss in the National Kitchen and Bathroom Association’s annual design competition — near miss as in honorable mention.

This year, Susan’s entry in the same competition was a kitchen; her award was first place, and, as we all have reason to know at mealtime, reverie alone won’t do it with kitchens, either.

This is not meant to make you feel poorly about the disaster you’ve made of your own kitchen. Susan actually holds a degree in this design business, a degree I never suspected existed. And if you’ve witnessed the same kitchens I’ve witnesses, perhaps you didn't suspect it either.

Susan is a C.K.D, a certified kitchen designer. Under the supervision of the University of Illinois, candidates for this degree not only have course requirements to meet, they must also have four years of experience in the real world, designing and supervising installation. Susan estimates that there are “less than half a dozen” people in the Seattle area with this degree.

Susan’s award-winning kitchen, arguably the: best one of its size in the United States, happens to be installed in a Mercer Island home. It was entered in what is called "Category B," which simply means that the kitchen was bigger than a bread box — but not by much. Susan had to cram a complete residential kitchen into a space of 168 square feet or less. In this instance, the dimensions were 12 by 14, meaning that, in the unlikely event you wanted to lay Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson end to end along the wall, you’d probably have to do it in somebody else’s kitchen.

The problem was obviously compounded by the fact that this was not an abstract exercise. It was an exercise in satisfying a customer, and this customer wanted such challenging things in her kitchen as a double oven, a pantry and assorted other space gobblers. Susan met the challenge and had enough area left over on one wall to install a garden window, proper lighting being critical in a well-designed kitchen.

Susan describes the customers for her prize- winning kitchen as “empty nesters,” but adds that “they entertain a lot.”

Asked what sort of disaster such a kitchen might represent, say, for a family with four children and two adults, Susan insists, “It wouldn’t be a disaster at all, except for eating space. You’d have to eat in the dining room.” As it is, the Mercer Island kitchen has a snack bar with ample eating space for two.

Susan, who works for [Kitchen Design & Specialty Shoppe] in Woodinville, spends much of her time helping people remodel. Thanks to poor design (commonly seen even in trade magazines, she says), many kitchens have the appearance of Western Europe after the World War II.

Among common mistakes she encounters are cook tops placed too close to the end of cabinets, or too close to a corner (both practices are unsafe); refrigerators placed too far from a counter top, or what Susan calls a “landing spot”; inadequate ventilation; and poor lighting. “Almost every kitchen we remodel has poor lighting,” she says.

Susan designed her own kitchen 11 years ago. It was her first design project, she says, and though she remains happy with the efficient use the kitchen makes of limited space, it poses a problem for her on Sundays when her family arrives en masse. The crowd actually varies from eight to 12 visitors, and not one of them can get into the kitchen to help her. It’s strictly a one cook facility.

The moral here is that no matter how ingenious a designer you might be, there are limits. And if you happen to be reading this amid the clutter of cornflakes boxes and unwashed dishes, I hope that disclosure brings a small measure of comfort to you.