Unfortunately, the article is about restaurants.
Smell. To keep the smells of cooking from overwhelming the rest of the house. In the process of building a new house and it will be a separate kitchen. Well, technically, a wet kitchen that is closed off and a small dry kitchen connected to the dining area for dealing with things that aren't strong smelling. This setup is pretty standard in here in Asia.
Now back in a house with a connection to the outside. Actually does something.
Although I try to cook outside, because cooking inside means I have to pay for more AC.
Another nice trend is street level shops and restaurants mixed with housing above. This fights the "estate for everyone" mcmansion trend that separates people.
FYI this is how most non-american towns and cities have been designed for … ever? Go into any European old town center and it’s full of street level shops with residential on the floors above. Judging from popular photos, much of Asia and Africa are like this as well.
But I’m probably biased because I grew up in a city and regularly visited grandparents with legit farms. If you’re gonna have land, it should support at least a decent-sized garden … maybe a few fruit trees, nice shed, couple chickens.
You definitely don’t want a yard that’s spitting distance to your neighbors’ house, that’s just silly.
I don't care about having land (nor yard - I especially don't want to take care of one), but detached house is the only way to have loud and/or space intensive hobbies (playing music with drums, karaoke, machine shop). Invent magic sound-isolating material and I'd prefer large flats in buildings, for easy access to everything.
And I’ve lived in detached suburban houses where you can hear your neighbors sneeze.
That seems much easier than the examples I mentioned. I would like you to be right though, and if you are - that it was more common.
> And I’ve lived in detached suburban houses where you can hear your neighbors sneeze.
True, but at least you have some control over soundproofing if you own the entire thing and if that's something you care about.
This is not intended to be like open plan office seating, where nobody can escape. This should be combined with appropriate quiet places too.
Open plan living plus individual bedrooms and things like den/study/second lounge, etc gives flexibility.
Because my mother would die if guests saw her stack of dirty dishes next to the sink.
Not long ago, cooking was often done exclusively by “the help”.
This wasn't really upper class but it was influenced by British norms, albeit in the US, even if there weren't servants involved.
So this doesn't quite answer why they settled on keeping it hidden instead of a display of entertainment. There is no reason to think people in that time wouldn't have found the same enjoyment in watching the food get made.
Most likely the answer is that it's just what one notable person happened to decide, by random chance, to do with his kitchen arrangement, and everyone else copied it in hopes that it would make them equally notable. Pretty much all human behaviour can be explained that way.
And even the ones that do have a theatre of sorts have background preparation and dish-washing that nobody wants to see.
Oh no. Chances are the real engine of this change is the recent mass-media discovery of food-prep as a heroic and cool activity.
Celebrity chefs used to be obnoxious, "always-be-prepared", by-the-book home-goddess archetypes like Delia Smith; at some point over the last 25 years, they turned into sexy, improvising, creative rockstars. The creativity-impoverished masses, bored to death by day after day looking at computer screens, now get their kicks by eating and cooking.
But it could have gone the other way. The first notable person could have recognized the entertainment, and the later notable person could have decided it was better to keep hidden. We don't know why the first one decided to go with hidden, and likely it was just a random choice.
You ever fry fish or saute a dish with a lot of garlic? That's why. Sure, powerful vent hoods, but not everyone has that luxury.
Now, for the poorer people (majority?) they'd have similar sized rooms, just fewer - and the kitchen would often double as a dining room (and the living room might double as a formal dining room, if present).
I find I much prefer "openable concept" than open concept - large sliding doors to the kitchen, perhaps, or a drop down under a hutch onto a breakfast bar, so you can close the kitchen off from the rest of the house if you want.
Modern energy saving building is often reverting to pre-A/C designs - of which one of the tricks is various rooms of various sizes for different times of the day.
One side was kitchen and living room while the other was „cold“ and usually not used much during the winter.
If you’re going stickbuild at the turn of the century, getting large beams from the sawmill would still be costly. Especially over 20/30 feet.
It probably varies from place to place? Here in north-east europe traditional peasant setup was kitchen and living room together. Kitchen stove was used to heat the house as well. Usually houses would have cold side and warm side. Warm side was warmed up while cooking. People would also sleep in the warm side during the winter.
It only started to change in 20th century with people moving to apartments or building fancier houses en masse.
However by the end of 20th century people were already gravitating back to the usual setup of joint kitchen and living room. Which is the norm in new buildings for the past 20 years or so.