A manifesto against the tyranny of luxury kitchens.
Before the internet, you only had to keep up with the Joneses– they were real people who lived nextdoor and probably drove a Corvette.
And even if you might have liked their car for yourself, you knew for a fact that they wore too much cologne, misused the word Machiavellian, and were just generally unlikable people who let their dog poop in everyone’s yard.


You used to have to subscribe to Town & Country or Architectural Digest if you wanted to feel bad about your house… But then the internet came along—eradicating every shred of reality and replacing it with Christopher Peacock.
Now you can discover for FREE, any time of day or night, that your kitchen, your bathroom, your entire house… actually, your whole life is so subpar that it’s amazing you haven’t flat out died.


The internet has given the entire home-luxury-design-industry access to the inside of our minds at all times. This is extra convenient for them because they can constantly remind us that anything less than a kitchen filled with glamour and elegance and a wine refrigerator is just sad… so, so, so sad.
And the sadder your life looks, the fancier the faucet you will buy – advertising 101.
(Incase you are wondering where on the sadness-scale my life falls, apparently it is here. I am pretty sure that faucet would make me a better person.)

But eventually I will have to replace that faucet… Because it will go out of style. Because all of this is a trend.
A TREND.
The most expensive trend ever—white, white, white, white, splash of soapstone for contrast, white, white, white.


But someday Christopher Peacock will be the equivalent of the ubiquitous oak cabinetry from the 80’s. Remember country kitchens?
DON’T YOU REMEMBER?
Soon there will be a whole new trend. (Once they figure out how to make something more expensive.)
I personally think it should be THE-KITCHEN-I-HAVE-IS-FINE trend. We should all STOP redoing our kitchens. It is MADNESS people. Do you have a stove? A refrigerator? A place to rinse stuff and chop it? Then you HAVE A KITCHEN.


This is my message for the day—acceptance. Accept the kitchen you have. A new one will not bring you health or happiness. (Except, maybe the one below.)
Let us band together and KEEP the kitchen we have. Let us embrace oak cabinetry from 1980.
Let us rise up against the tyranny of stainless steel.
There is nothing wrong with your taupe electric range.
And Formica!
Let us bring Formica back!

I mean, I personally am not planning to do that. I write a blog about restoring our house… therefore I am legally obligated to bring new meaning to whimsy and creativity and a mindbogglingly giant range hood.
Infact, I will probably be required to travel to a small town in Italy to mine the marble slabs myself.
When I get home, I will do a peppy post about DIY-mining your own marble. And I will include tips about where to find delicious artisanal (gluten free!) pastries made by villagers who have been growing specialty grains for over 900 years.
I will be sure to annotate the pictures for Pinterest with captions that are overlaid with squiggles and dots and three different fonts. (So that it will appeal to both four year olds, and women who are shopping for kitchen counters.)
April 7, 2016 @ 10:22 am
Oh this post reminds me of my days working with my Dad in his custom cabinet shop. Which gets most of its business from people building new homes or remodeling kitchens and bathrooms.
And every cabinet maker and installer really hopes the white trend ends soon because it’s nothing but a pain in the butt from the staining/painting process to the installing. And then the countless times those cabinets have to be retouched if someone is crazy enough to think they are a good idea when you have children.
White paint chips horribly and looks worse then a dent in natural wood.
With all of that being said I have helped install many beautiful kitchens over the years and the ones I drool the most over have natural unstained wood. Oak is old school yes, but walnut, hickory, cherry, birch ahhhh…….those look beautiful!! Just please!!!! Don’t have them painted white! ?
April 16, 2016 @ 3:09 pm
“And I will include tips about where to find delicious artisanal (gluten free!) pastries made by villagers who have been growing specialty grains for over 900 years.”
No, you’ll write about even though you are gluten intolerant in the U.S., you can totally eat bread in Italy because Monsanto and other conglomerates haven’t ruined all the grain crops.
April 18, 2016 @ 4:59 pm
This is the best thing I have read in a long time! I am about to spruce up my kitchen, which was already outdated when I bought it 13 years ago. I will attempt to make it more to my liking and a bit more functional, but I’ll keep the honey oak cabinets.
April 19, 2016 @ 1:47 pm
Maybe you should start a challenge post on Pinterest or something, challenging people to show their kitchen, how it is right now and perhaps it will go viral. That would be fun to participate in!! That said, I love beautiful kitchens and drool over them but it’s mostly just in appreciation of their beauty, I don’t let it get me down that’s for sure. Good thing to remember is that person with that high end, trendy new kitchen has someone that they are jealous of too 😉
April 20, 2016 @ 9:39 pm
I have a new white and grey kitchen that actually does make me happy! We waited and saved for 6 years to save for the house we wanted. When I am not working, I spend most of my time cooking for my family and it is a pleasure to be in such a bright light filled easy to clean kitchen that finally has enough storage. I didn’t design it for anyone else but us and I no longer covet Pinterest or Houzz kitchens. I am just happy to be home!
April 24, 2016 @ 11:28 am
I LOVE this!!!! Thank you thank you thank you for writing it! Instant gratification can’t come to most people (that I know, anyway) and we have to put things together bit by bit in the old houses we were so fortunate to be able to purchase. If they were to stay the way they are for the rest of our lives, we would be lucky. Trends come and they go, but our house provides comfort, safety, security, love, laughter and the best memories of our lives. I am totally guilty of being a reno-zombie for long stretches of my very precious and limited “me time”, sifting through a gazillion pictures on houzz and adding a multitude of pins to my “kitchen renovation” board. Enough. It’s fine to dream and maybe have a goal for the final result, but from now on, all my energy and love will go to what I have, not what “should” be in my house.
May 10, 2016 @ 12:12 pm
This is spot on. I hope you don’t mind that I share it. I love your writing!
May 30, 2016 @ 11:09 am
This article is brilliant. As a Realtor with some green awareness, I must constantly bite my tongue when my buyer clients pronounce perfectly functional kitchens to be so “outdated” that they cannot possibly purchase the home they are seeing. Thank you for writing this article. It effectively states what is in my mind. As an aside, I “remodeled my own 25 year old dated kitchen….mostly by refinishing my existing cabinets, refinishing the floors, changing out the drawer hardware, and replacing my fridge and dishwasher. Everyone thinks I did a completely new remodel. I did not even change out the light fixtures. I toyed with the “white kitchen” but went with simply refinishing my cabinets. As a serious cook, I am not neat enough for an all white/light kitchen.
June 28, 2016 @ 2:21 pm
My life won’t be complete until I have a contrasting island with two (not three) pendants dangling over a carrera slab. I will be so pinteresting.
August 26, 2016 @ 4:54 pm
You wrote my thoughts! Thank you!!
I’m rebelling! In fact, I may go as far as Kramer and have NO kitchen. The shower will steam my food and wash my dishes. Go Me!
September 23, 2016 @ 10:06 am
Great Articles, love this blog.
November 27, 2016 @ 11:32 am
Yes! Anyone remember the white kitchens of the 90’s? Not cabinets…appliances…WHITE, WHITE, WHITE and then came Stainless Steel 😉
December 24, 2016 @ 1:46 pm
LOL! Just what I needed to read today!
January 11, 2017 @ 11:46 am
I know this is quite an old post, but it was so funny reading because that’s really where I’ve come around with my kitchen… at least for now. We moved into our home about two and a half years ago, and the one big cosmetic change that I really wanted to make soon was replacing the old formica countertops. They were probably put in when they kitchen was redone in the 70’s or so, and were a weird pinky beige, with the brown seam lines and everything. I thought, surely we can find some kind of Ikea butcher block, or new formica that’s faux soapstone, or something like that.
Well as anyone who has bought a home quickly learns, we soon discovered there were far more important things we needed to spend our money on, like replacing our leaking roof, and now two and a half years later, I’ve decided the formica, it’s really not that bad. After all, it’s probably between 30 and 40 years old, and is still in great shape. No major scratches, burns, stains–only a tiny bit of wear and tear if you lean down and look really closely. Sure, it’s “outdated” and I don’t really love the pink tones, but it wears like iron. What more do I need? So we just painted the kitchen a complimentary tone and added a desperately-needed backsplash so we could clean flood splatters, and now, I’m pretty happy with my kitchen, all things considered.
That said, I reserve the right to replace the whole kitchen someday. You know, when I win the lottery and build my dream addition.
February 28, 2017 @ 10:27 am
You are delightful!(only big word I know ,hehehe)
I truly wait with baited(used correctly?) breath until your next post. I bow to you and worship at your feet!
Post more often and I will love you forever!
(Update on your kitchen is past due!)
March 1, 2017 @ 8:03 pm
Amen!
March 4, 2017 @ 4:17 pm
My dream kitchen includes standard white cabinets, open shelves, a farmhouse sink, cuttingboard countertops, subway tile, and A GOD DAMN AGA.
It’s not dream, really. More of a need. I NEED a $12,000 stove. My need is so great that I considered starting a Go Fund Me, with a nice sob story about a dying wife who loves to cook and oh she really deals with her terminal illness by cooking, she cooks for the local orphanage and it helps her through things, all the kids love her food, it gives them a reason to live dontachaknow, and all she really wants in her dying days is this ridiculously overpriced box of fire. But ha! *I* am the dying wife, and I’m not dying, not unless you include how I’m DYING for an Aga. And I don’t even cook! All I want it for is so I can say, “Put the kettle on the Aga and we’ll have us some tea” because that’s ALL I’d use it for. TEA! Sure I have a Keurig and a tea kettle that looks like Hitler and a perfectly serviceable Jenn-Air stove but I NEED THAT AGA.
But really these kitchens are way overboard. I don’t need my kitchen to look like its own palace.
March 11, 2017 @ 12:18 pm
I am 100% with this. Except for the part where I hope to redo our kitchen in the next few years. 😉
March 21, 2017 @ 3:27 pm
3 years late to the game but I am going through a kitchen renovation now and I must have said 1,000,000 times already that I don’t want a matchy matchy kitchen. I want it to look acquired over time. And I most definitely do not want the same kitchen island that is in every kitchen renovated in the past 10 years. Then the builders look at me like I am nuts and then remind me about resale. I don’t care – the next person can put it in.
March 23, 2017 @ 11:53 am
Just reading this post – the line; “Accept the kitchen you have. A new one will not bring you health or happiness” can be applied to most things! Kitchens, cars, husbands…not closets, though! Pretty sure an awesome closet not only improves your MENTAL health but could avert murder. o_O