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We left off with kitchens being developed from chipboard and Formica, soon Melamine was in regular use (this was chipboard coated on both sides with a washable surface). As you can imagine that saved a lot of time in the workshop for the small bespoke companies, but it also opened up a whole market for mass producing cost effective flat pack furniture.

So now we have MFI and soon to follow the death of local hardware store and the birth of DIY. Even though MFI was seen generally as poor quality it didn’t stop it being successful and with that other companies followed suite and it wasn’t too long before we had a choice of where to buy flat pack from. But hang on I’ve missed out the important bit, to be able to mass produce furniture the furniture had to be standard sizes.

Generally speaking up to now fitted furniture was made and installed by Norman round the corner working out of his garage (you get the idea) but now you could by the boxes from MFI and just get Norman to fit then for you, or even fit them yourself. But how did MFI know what size boxes would fit in you kitchen??

The problem was to be able to mass produce furniture standards had to be set and here was the birth of standard size units. I’m not sure where the standards came from exactly, If I had to guess I would say they evolved from various larger bespoke companies that were trying to increase turnover but certainly when the retail shop and the factory became separated standard sizes were required.

A classic example is a kitchen wall unit. Originally it was common for a wall unit to run all the way to the ceiling, as the wall unit and doors were being made for each kitchen after the kitchen had been measured. The flat pack version had to be a fixed size, but what size should they make it. Why not kill 2 birds with one stone and make the wall units the same height and with as the base units, then they don’t have to stock as many doors. As easy as that the standard 720mm tall wall unit was created.

So by now some nationwide companies had set standards in unit sizes, colours and door designs but the public new that if they wanted choice Norman was still around the corner. This worked for a while but with the world going technology crazy when Norman packed up his garage all the little Normans were learning how to be computer programmers and not learning dads trade. A new generation has come along that know nothing of Norman or what he did. This combined with the fast food “do you want a sink with that” type of approach to furniture. As in many other industries the old skills of bespoke fitted furniture are at risk of extinction.

You may think this is a bit extreme but the more I look for genuine bespoke companies the more fakes I find that are actually buying units in and passing them off as bespoke. Small companies that design, manufacture and install fitted furniture are few and far between but the good new is they are still out there. Sat beneath the expensive media cloud of kitchen advertising, waiting for lost soles that have been bounced form one showroom to another by salesmen full of crap. Looking for the answer to the eternal question “There’s got to be something better than this”.

By the 1970’s Chipboard and Formica were challenging the look of the traditional kitchen. My dad clearly remembers being told that “carpentry was old hat and the future was plastic, no one would want wood anymore.” What in fact happened was a new style of kitchen was being created. I’m going to explain a bit about the manufacturing process to help show the changes from the original wood kitchens. In the early days the chipboard was supplied as chipboard, no design or colour, just bear chipboard and the kitchen company glued the laminate on. At the time my dad was working for a company in Leeds and the process went something like this. The chipboard was cut to size by a guy on a circular saw called bob who only had a total of 6 fingers left, The Formica was then cut and glued onto the chipboard by another guy who spent all day working with contact adhesive and no ventilation (but it was the seventies). The parts were then passed to the bench team for construction and finally taken to the customer for fitting. The fitting was expected to be done in the day.

Another important development that came with all of this was an overlay hinge. In the first kitchen you will remember me mention that the doors sat within timber frames (now referred to as in frame) but now a hinge was available so when the doors are shut the edge of the door lines up with the outside of the cabinet. (Referred to as Overlay) Well combine that with the ability to have big panels or doors out of one flat piece of chipboard created a whole new way of not only building kitchens but the way they would look. In addition to the advances in the materials kitchens were made out of there were big advances in the appliance market also leading to more of a amalgamation between the appliance and unit. Up to now the appliances stood by themselves and so did the cabinets, (some kitchens still have all freestanding appliances and again this shows the variety of style in today’s kitchens). Now built in appliances were a lot more readily available.

At this time although there may have been some nationwide kitchen companies most people called on their local kitchen company when they needed a kitchen and it was manufactured and fitted for them to suite their individual kitchen. I.e. bespoke kitchens were the standard.

Bypassing cave men and open fires with pots hung over, originally fitted kitchens were cabinets either from an early form of sheet timber (block board) or just a framed cabinet with a framed face. The worktop would be of wood, tile, stone or granite and most commonly a ceramic sinks. A more budget version and quite common would be a ceramic sink sat on two sections of brick wall and a slab of stone or wood as a worktop again normally sat on two sections of wall simple but effective. This is however a bit before my time so I wont pretend to know to much about this just what I have been told and seen in pictures.

Back to the framed kitchens I mentioned above. The purpose of the frames was to hang the doors from. This was because the only type of hinge readily available at the time was a butt hinge, like you would hang a normal internal door on. The doors would be made like a regular solid timber internal door (but smaller) five or six pieces of timber, varying in complexity and joined together to create a cabinet door, the sizes would be kept small to avoid any movement in the timber. There were many different individual techniques used by the craftsmen at the time but the important thing to realise is all the early furniture (including the lovely antique pieces you see on the antique road show) were all mad from wood. “Well what are the made form now paper?” well not quite but for the majority of today’s market its not wood like the old carpenters used to use. For more about Wood look out for “Hardwood Softwood Man maid Wood?” a blog coming soon to your PC. To continue… made form real wood.

This mean that everything was built by hand and therefore very time consuming but the most important part was the drawers. Each drawer would normally have been a dovetail box that slid on a wooden lat positioned either side of the cabinet, remember the old sit coms where someone would be attempting to open a jammed drawer and then when it was finally rived open it would come all the way out sending the content all over, ha ha. Funny and true unit drawers got a really bad press as did doors that could swell up resulting in them not closing. Real wood comes from a living tree and even when turned into furniture will still react to the elements and move this is an important thing to remember.

To most people a kitchen is somewhere food is prepared, served and in a lot of cases consumed, it could be referred to as the hub of the home and no matter the price or style of the kitchen this has, and always will, remain to be its functional purpose.

This being the case why is there so much choice and style in the kitchen market? So much so it has lead to the creation of specialists in separate styles of kitchen design.

Well the same could be said of shoes or cars, they all have on main practical purpose but yet appear in so many different forms. We are just a small ripple in the kitchen pond but from following the industry from a young age and watching my dads company ride the wave of change I am going to share my view on the history of the kitchen…. Well I’m going to write for a bit about stuff, not quite an encyclopaedia of undisputed fact but a few (I think) interesting points that would help answer some of the “why do they do that like that” type of questions everyone asks (or is that just me?)