Last night I had the pleasure of attending the holiday celebration held by the NKBA Florida Treasure Coast Chapter. The party was held at the amazing Florida Builder Appliances Showroom in West Palm Beach. The event was a fund raiser for Hugs and Kisses, Inc. Not only was it a fun night out, but I also had the chance to browse all the latest and greatest of the appliance world. At one point, appliance diva Stephanie Walsh said, "Come over here. Have I got something to show you!" She then ushered us over the one of the most intriguing appliances I've seen in a while. Meet the Gaggenau Lift Oven. It's the quintessential space saving oven in a functional design installed right between to your upper cabinets. Totally cool and I had a lot of fun pushing that button to magically raise and lower the unit. (It doesn't take much to entertain me). Why the lift and not a regular oven door, you ask? Here's what Gaggnau has to say about the amazing "lift" oven.

Experience the unprecedented ease that brings sheer cooking pleasure into the kitchen. Gaggenau introduces the 24-inch Lift Oven with the LiftMatic function for unique oven loading and unloading. With the simple push of a button, the Lift Oven’s glass ceramic base lowers directly from the oven to the countertop, where food dishes can be easily loaded and then raised into the cooking cavity. Since heat rises, the heat remains in the oven cavity, resulting in minimal energy loss during the lift operation. The Lift Oven’s functionality increases safety, as the need to reach into a hot oven to remove food has been eliminated. Foods are easily moved from the workspace to the lowered base, including breads and pizza that can be cooked to perfection directly on the glass ceramic base, without additional trays or non-stick baking products. Workflow is maximized as movement between food preparation areas to the oven is minimized. Opportunity for spills in the time from the countertop to the oven door is diminished. The innovative design of the Lift Oven with built-in placement in top cabinet locations or on a kitchen wall provides versatile options for smaller kitchens and opens up additional cabinet space in larger kitchens.

This fully integrated oven features 11 heating methods, including convection. The oven also provides automatic temperature recommendation and precise electronic temperature control. Gaggenau, remaining true to the credo of “Form follows function”, maintains ease in all facets of the cooking process, including the task of cleaning the Lift Oven, with the highly effective pyrolytic self-cleaning program that burns off splashes and residues left behind by cooked food. The oven is encased in a sleek stainless steel-tinted glass front, illuminated by halogen lighting that provides a luminous view of the interior, displaying perfectly prepared food.

You too can see the Gaggenau Lift Oven and much more at Florida Builder Appliances. It's worth a visit if you are thinking of a new kitchen or just an appliance upgrade. Stephanie Walsh and Florida Builder Appliances are listed as one of my favorite local resources on this site. If you go, let me know what you find.

The Frankfurt Kitchen 1926 Wikipedia

So where were we? As I recall, we were examining the roots of the heart of the home (Click on Part I here.) to see just how we got from our origins to where we are now. Today I will show you the first MOD(ERN) kitchen.

Although cooking made it to the indoors pretty quickly, water pipes in cities were not commonly laid until the end of the 19th century. Open shelves were the original go-to storage and coal fired stoves ruled. Cupboards, or cabinets, were first used by the upper classes to protect contents from dust, steam and smoke. The middle class kitchen was were the family lived with the living rooms and studies saved for special times. Sound familiar?

The first standardizations for the kitchen came from the German brand Poggenphol (est. 1892). In case you ever wondered, this is where we got the ergonomically pleasing counter top height of 36". These new guidelines were the result of time-motion studies known at Taylorism. As women increasingly found the need to aquire factory jobs, the need for efficiency in the kitchen increased and the Frankfurt Kitchen was born in 1926. I guess you could call its creator, Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky the first kitchen designer! The design was influenced by railway dining cars of the day with two main objectives, to save precious time and make modern convenience affordable to the masses. These two priorities still endure so we'll keep them. What can we chuck? Maybe the closed-in tight quarters and the limited counter space?

The pre-historic Chemex Coffee Maker also on show at the MOMA


Margarete's Creation on Exhibit at the MOMA

Check out this exhibit which opened September 15th at the MOMA in NYC. This examination of modern food prep is called Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen . spanning the last century of Western cookery -- from the architecture of the kitchen itself to the introduction of newer and stranger gadgets, like Chemex coffee pots and even Tupperware! The show runs until March 11, 2011, and yes I'm already planning another jaunt to the B.A.!!

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