Is the kitchen work triangle complete nonsense?

Do you need a better kitchen work triangle? Maybe…or maybe it's completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems.

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:

• How the kitchen work triangle became a thing. 
• Why it could be the source of your kitchen flow woes. 
• When a traditional kitchen work triangle might just solve your problems. 

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at https://www.midmod-midwest.com/2401

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Transcript

00:00
Does your kitchen need a better work triangle? Odds are, if you've ever given serious thought to an upgrade for the kitchen of your mid-century home, you've run across the term and if you have issues with how your kitchen works, not enough storage, not enough prep space, no room to share the work, a crowd underfoot at dinnertime every night, you've wondered if this mythical concept of a perfect kitchen work triangle is the solution, maybe, or maybe it's completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems. 

00:26
Now, I've been pretty anti the kitchen work triangle concept for a number of years now, but recently I've come to rethink that negativity under certain circumstances. So today, let's talk about if you should and how you could use kitchen work triangle theory to improve your cooking space. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You're listening to Episode 2401. 

00:58
So we're back from a little two week spring break of the podcast. I hope you didn't miss me too much, because I'm going to be testing out a new way of delivering the podcast in themed season batches. This is actually a throwback to the way I did it originally, long ago, when I started recording this in 2019, I did one seven episode season and figured I'd covered nearly everything I needed to say. When I thought of a few more things to say, I came back with another season, and then I did it again eventually, and I really don't remember when it became a weekly drop, and I've been delivering it that way for many years now. 

01:34
But I'm not actually a podcaster. I'm a residential architect and small business owner, so the weekly content grind is, well, it's a lot anyway, I don't want to stop doing this, and I won't, but I've been exploring my options for fun new formats to keep it easy to batch, and to make sure I'm always sharing something relevant with you, not just filling up the calendar. So our very first themed season is going to be on kitchens, because, of course, it is a kitchen is the heart of any home, and it's the most complex part of any master plan design, and it's just constantly on all of our minds. 

02:07
Now, I have done a kitchen season of the mid mode remodel podcast before, and that was back in 2021 it's great. I still believe everything I said in those episodes. And if you're curious and antsy for this season to get started, go and check that out. It's season five. Episodes 501 through 508 Yeah. Those early seasons were nice, short and sweet, and starts in maybe February of 2021, anyway, there are some great ideas in that season about layouts, about finished materials, about the history of the mid-century kitchen, including my interview with Sarah Archer, who literally wrote the book on the mid-century kitchen, and so much more. 

02:46
Plus, I cap it off with an easy episode on level one or DIY, upgrades you can make to your existing kitchen while you wait for bigger improvements. And that's all good. But also 2021 is five years ago, which means I've designed more than 100 Master Plan packages since then, and nearly every single one of those master plans has included some or a lot of design work in the kitchen. 

03:08
So I have more generalized, good information to share with you, more specific use cases, and just a lot more thoughts on how to do right by your mid-century kitchen to share with you this season. I'm kicking off this very first episode by contradicting something that I've been saying publicly and privately for the last several years, and in fact, I think I touched on it several times in that last season, which is the concept of the kitchen work triangle. Now I wouldn't say that I've quite Elizabeth Benedict, this my feelings, my feelings are so different. 

03:41
In fact, they're quite the opposite. But I have come around to a new appreciation for certain cases where the kitchen work triangle is absolutely the right choice, as well as standing by my theory that in many cases it is not more on that in a moment before I move on, if this season is hitting you at exactly the right time because you've been thinking about a kitchen update and pondering your kitchen issues and Pinterest Doom, scrolling for Cool Kitchen ideas and generally going in circles around kitchen questions. then I'm so happy that I've caught you here! 

04:12
I'd love to point you in the direction of several further resources to help you in your kitchen planning journey. First, as I've said, there are lots of kitchen related episodes in the past, and you can kind of find all of the best ones, plus a free guide to the main things you want to consider in the design of any kitchen update at mid mod dash midwest.com/kitchen, kitchen in the singular. Under that free guide on that page, I've gathered case study, blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos and more. There's also a link to a past recording of my mid-century kitchen design clinic. 

04:45
But if you're considering that two hour workshop, I actually recommend you hold off on buying the replay, because I'm gearing up to hold a live kitchen workshop on that topic and again in May, and I think you'd enjoy coming to it live. If what you really want is less of a how to lesson and more of my personal design insight, then you might want to schedule a consult call with me so I can capture and answer all your top of mind kitchen questions as you ask them. 

05:09
Or just apply to work with mid my Midwest so we can have a free lead call and suss out if we're a good match for each other for a master plan design, including kitchen, find all of the resources that I mentioned, plus a transcript of the audio on the show notes page for this at midmod-midwest.com/2401. Onto our show. 

05:31
Okay, so let's dig in on when the kitchen work triangle does and does not work. This came up for me in conversation when I was having a design kickoff meeting with another new client recently, and they were thinking about how to improve on the frustrating layout of their currently original mid-century kitchen, which had been sort of exhaustively redecorated but not redesigned in the 1980s sidebar, my most eye roll inducing kitchen scenario is if You live in a mid-century house that was remodeled in the 80s or 90s with new, then trendy, now out of period finishes, which are dated, but they didn't bother to update the layout to fit the family that lived there any better. 

06:14
They just replaced everything that was there with new kitchen fittings, which are, ironically, probably of less good quality than the original mid-century fittings. This is such a ridiculous way to remodel, and the best thing we can do in the face of that is do a better job of remodeling. Now take the opportunity to consider layout improvements as well as esthetic improvements, if we are going to be going so far as to replace original mid-century or at any other point built ins in our homes. But to come back to my point, the classic mid-century layout of a kitchen is either an L or a U shaped kitchen, which is a great example of work triangle theory and simultaneously does not work for many modern families. So here's our question, is the kitchen work triangle completely nonsense? 

07:01
Well, no, it's not, and I've known this for years, even though I have dismissed it as a concept, I've encouraged people not to focus too hard on their kitchen work triangle as a test of whether their new kitchen idea is a good one. It does, in fact, work in certain specific cases, the cases it was designed for, and I'll talk a little bit more about the history of how the kitchen work. Triangle came about, how it was designed, in a moment. 

07:27
But for other types of households, it's actually a terrible idea, one that causes congestion, dropped leftover containers and eventually perhaps an unbalanced division of labor in the kitchen. This is not what you want for your home. So let's focus back on the history just briefly, and I'll put some links to some really great, well researched, kind of online academic resources about this. 

07:52
But the theory of the kitchen work triangle came out of a time when there were a lot of other pieces in play. It was a time when we were interested in factory labor improving safety conditions in the factory floor and also in the home. So we were trying to get, like open flames away from cooking life. We were trying to keep mashed fingers and amputated limbs out of the common experience of people in the workplace and people in the home and we were also very simultaneously focused on industrializing every part of society, in the labor force. 

08:28
How could activities be more economically efficient? More labor efficient, more productive. I talked about this in Episode 1603 when I focused a little bit on the history of the mid-century, kitchen and the kitchen work, trial and CO concept, specifically, is attributed to a person that you may have encountered in your childhood reading, if you read the book Cheaper by the Dozen, this should not be confused with the movie Cheaper by the Dozen, which is just a silly, I Guess, family rom com sitcom, silly situational movie. 

09:01
The book is a biography written by one of the children in a household of 12 children, the children of Lillian, and I'm forgetting her husband's name, but actually, I kind of love that Galbraith, who were both industrial engineers and they worked on efficiency studies, which they applied to their own lives as the parents of 12 children, and they both worked full time. She came up with the concept of the kitchen work triangle in the 1940s and it was basically taking three items, the stove, the sink and the refrigerator, and putting them into a triangular arrangement that should be no greater all of the sides of it should add up to no greater than 26 feet, with a typical distance between each of five and a half feet, the goal was to limit the number of steps someone would need to take in order to move between the different appliances.

09:50
Now that's great, and it works perfectly if you are one person trying to efficiently work on meal prep in your individual space. There's nothing wrong with trying to apply ergonomics to things we do on a daily basis to keep ourselves alive. Ironically, she also was very interested in the idea of an ergonomically appropriate counter height, which depends on suiting the height of the counter to the height of the people that live in and work in the kitchen. 

10:19
She was only thinking about fitting a kitchen to the housewife who lived in the house. She was not worried about the average height difference between two parts of a couple, for example. But there was a conflicting societal impulse that was coming into sort of American kitchen design theory at the same time, which was the uniform height continuous countertop, and the benefit of that, in many people's mind, was easy to clean, no corners, no griminess. 

10:47
And also it's esthetically pleasing to have a uniform counter height, when you actually think about it, though, the height for storage of things, the height for a work surface, even the height that, for example, if you if you are a nerd like me who likes to make your own bread or pizza dough, occasionally, the height of a countertop you need on versus the height of a countertop you mix on versus the height of a countertop you chop on, are not all the same height. 

11:09
So at the same time as we were kind of having a customizable, ergonomically fitted kitchen conversation on one side of the room, other people were having a hygiene driven we must keep germs out of our kitchens. Everything must be hospital grade, clean that lent itself to more uniformity, more Formica and metal countertop services that were a clean no gaps line across the whole kitchen, and we ended up with this sort of modern compromise, the mid-century, modern compromise of a very esthetically pleasing, uniform kitchen that actually ends up not being as effective as it could be in most homes as it was applied, it's particularly inappropriate for kitchens where it's not just one person trying to efficiently deliver meals, but rather a family trying to share labor and their time together. 

11:57
Humans are not actually cogs in the machine in a factory setting, certainly not in our home environment. And so the irony of having a standard kitchen counter height, which came out of research and testing and perfection and ergonomics, is that what if the set counter height is wrong? In fact, it's not actually appropriate for the average height of a woman in the era that it was designed for. And even if you're not that average height, is it right for you? 

12:26
So long story short, the kitchen work triangle was designed for the same person that the entire mid-century kitchen was, in theory, designed for a singular home maker who was working alone in, let's be clear, her kitchen. So when does a kitchen work? Triangle not work? Well, it does not work in situations where more than one person is in the kitchen. It doesn't support people coming in and grabbing snacks while someone else is trying to prepare something. And it is absolutely not effective for two adults to collaborate on one meal prep at the same time, or even to allow one adult to make a meal and another adult to be in the kitchen space, providing snacks, prepping meals ahead for the week, setting up lunch boxes, or just supervising kids. 

13:11
Subconsciously, I've been factoring that frustration in to my mind for a number of years, and I spend a lot of time in my design meetings at the first at the kickoff meeting, talking to my clients about how they, as a household, specifically use their kitchen for any couple. I want to know. Do you take turns or do you cook at the same time? How elaborate are the meals you're putting on? Are you bakers or are you just reheating leftovers? Do you host and if so, do you prepare a meal while socializing, are you supervising homework, or, more even tensely, are you supervising homeschool while things are happening in the kitchen? 

13:49
All of those answers inform the way I think about the layouts of specific kitchens and so in general, every time I've thought about a kitchen for a family, I have dismissed out of hand the concept of the kitchen work triangle. But recently, I had a different kickoff call with another client, and we talked about his very small galley kitchen, which he doesn't intend to substantially change. 

14:13
We're not going to change the footprint of this space and how he does have friends over with whom he wants to socialize while he's prepping a dinner and he's trying to set up the new layout to keep them on one end of the two open sides of his galley kitchen so they don't get underfoot in the middle of the space while he's working. But in general, he's really interested in the idea of efficiency of complicated meals prepared on counter space in the right spot while rotating on one foot one step, and grabbing everything he needs from the fridge, the fridge, the stove and the sink. 

14:42
He used the phrase kitchen work triangle to me, and I felt myself sort of breathe in, ready to tell him, oh yeah. Well, the kitchen work triangle doesn't really work anymore. It's been it's not one of my favorite theories. And then I remembered, oh yeah. He is the use case for which the kitchen. Kitchen work triangle was developed an elaborate ingredients based Cook who works alone in a kitchen prizes efficiency and loves that feeling of being able to rotate on one foot and touch everything important in a single, concentrated cooking zone. 

15:14
The real irony here is that I, myself am a kitchen work triangle cook. I also cook alone. When the mood strikes me, I enjoy a slightly complicated process, and all of my favorite kitchens of the past have had layouts where I could turn step and reach everything I needed. But I've still spent the last several years treating the concept as bunk and speaking down about it on the podcast, on my blog, on YouTube to various clients. So here's where I am today, before you Google best kitchen remodel layout and find 10 articles, all telling you to either consider the kitchen work triangle and draw it onto your kitchen to test if it works, or possibly that the kitchen work triangle method is outdated, and you should use the kitchen zone method instead, instead of jumping to any of that begin with Master Plan thinking, which always starts with the personal and your own home. So those are the dream and discover points, in case you're keeping track. It's so easy to jump in on the classic internet research mistake that almost everyone makes just starting to learn. 

16:23
What are theories about this? Look for examples about this. See how other people's fill in the blank works, other people's kitchen, other people's footprint, other people's appliance layout. This can so easily lead you down the rabbit hole of circular thinking and wondering and grinding your gears on things. Instead, you've got to start from what you personally and your household specifically needs. 

16:45
So it will come down to the number of people who regularly cook simultaneously in your kitchen, or who exist simultaneously in your kitchen while cooking is happening, when a kitchen work triangle does not work is generally going to be a family kitchen for many families where two adults are either trying to cook collaboratively, or where one adult is prepping an upcoming meal while someone else is doing kitchen tasks, whether that be cleaning up, meal prepping or supervising, even in a kitchen where someone is taking on kitchen kitten tasks while other members of the household are just swirling around doing homework or getting under foot, grabbing a snack, getting a drink, existing in the space the work triangle is not going to be the right idea, and in fact, it's probably the problem you're experiencing right now. 

17:30
Your kitchen is more work triangle based than it should be for you. In any household where a family lives, the placement of the refrigerator is maybe the most important element of the major kitchen appliances represented by the kitchen work triangle, and not all mid-century kitchens that are organized around a work triangle, Miss on this one. Some of them have a work triangle and still get this right. 

17:50
But the key indicator here the test is, can someone walk into the kitchen, go to the fridge, perhaps even in full teenager mode, and stand there with the door open and study what's inside of it before they choose a snack or a drink without completely interrupting the workflow of someone else who is actively cooking. Can you invite a guest to help themselves to a cold drink without them slowing down the delivery of dinner? 

18:11
The kitchen work triangle doesn't specify where the fridge should go, just that it should be an easy reach of the sink and cooktop, but in a household where multiple people live and might be helping themselves to snack food the fridge and also the location of common pantry based snack food should both be slightly external to the main work area, so that someone can grab what they need and go without getting underfoot, okay, well, but doesn't that make life very inconvenient for the cook him or herself? 

18:40
Well, no, not necessarily in a slightly larger kitchen design, or a kitchen design where I've shifted the fridge away from the other major cooking apparatus. What I need to reinforce that for the cook is for there to be an intermediate flat surface where someone the cook, can raid the fridge for ingredients, then easily rotate and set them down somewhere in the middle, and then move back around the kitchen to grab from that setting down surface and work directly into a modified triangle. 

19:09
Basically, we're making a node where you can remote the fridge, I guess, into a kitchen work triangle theory. This is where an island or a peninsula is going to come in incredibly handy that predicates itself on a slightly more spacious kitchen design. And modern kitchens are loud, larger and a little bit more integrated into family living areas than mid-century kitchens, which, again, is preferred by many people for many reasons, but the island isn't just a place where you can put bar stools, and it isn't just a place where you can gather clutter. 

19:47
It specifically serves a function, particularly in this theory of a kitchen layout where you keep your range, maybe your cooktop and your oven separately, and your sink all pretty close to each other and close to some work prep surfaces, but the fridge is a little bit more remote. The island is your sort of secondary ingredient. Gathering location, you might be able to use that theory to improve even on your existing kitchen layout with a little bit of rearranging things and not a major remodel. 

20:09
For example, if you have the classic U shaped mid-century kitchen with an open center area, this is perhaps the most common and the most commonly complained about kitchen layout that I experience in my master plan clients, although I do all sorts of small, odd shaped kitchens, big, remodeled kitchens, galley kitchens, l kitchens, straight line kitchens, they all exist, but the thing we see the most often is the U shaped kitchen, and people who share their cooking duties do not like it. It's a design that works well for one person but causes a lot of traffic jams in the middle of the kitchen in two person spaces. 

20:49
Technically, there's enough counter space for two people to work opposite each other, but if they rotate and walk in order to get to another point in the kitchen, they're so likely to smack into someone else doing the same thing without warning. This is where adding a small butcher block unit to the center, a furniture piece to the center of that space can really do a lot of work, and it flies directly in the face of established kitchen dimension theory, which clearly states that everywhere across the internet, you always need at least 36 inches between one countersurface and an opposite countersurface, ideally 42 inches. 

21:24
So basic math tells us that the classic seven foot across open U of A mid-century kitchen doesn't have enough space to fit in an island. Obviously not seven minus three feet for one side. Circulation, three feet for the other side circulation leaves you with only one by one foot for a kitchen island. That is goofy nonsense, but a 20 inch by 20 inch butcher block piece of furniture with just 32 inch wide passageways all around it is actually an improvement over an open seven foot by seven foot wide space, and it gives you somewhere to rotate and set from the refrigerator. 

22:00
You can also set hot things off the cooktop, and it's a place where people can work themselves. But more importantly, even than that, it gives a directionality for people to move around that center space, rather than just crossing the open water at the center of the U I think about like shipping lanes. We need to enforce them with buoys. So the center Butcher Block Island is both the buoy and a practical word surface. It's a twofer. It's a win, win. 

22:24
If you're thinking about rewriting your kitchen layout from scratch, you've got even more options to open up the space. And while an island layout isn't the best for every space and every family, it can be extremely useful for households where multiple kitchen activities happen simultaneously, and it's a great spot to make sort of a kitchen refrigerator node, a landing spot to keep the refrigerator out of the central working space and more close to the circulation of the household, and still have a place to keep ingredients coming towards the kitchen work triangle in theory. 

22:55
So to recap, is the kitchen work triangle theory dead to me? It is not, but I am going to return to it sparingly, and I think I'll continue to do what I was doing without really naming it, which is when I hear from a household that only one person in that family grouping cooks ever, or only one person lives in this house and they like an efficient kitchen layout. I'm going to go right ahead and keep or maintain or suggest putting back, U shaped kitchen work triangle oriented kitchens. 

23:28
But if we're dealing with a household where more than one adult in the house is preparing food, particularly doing at their same time, particularly if they ever supplying food to kids or to guests who want to be able to see and interact with the cook at the same time, we're going to be leaning away from the kitchen work triangle and thinking about layouts that make it a little bit easier for someone to wander through the kitchen and help themselves to whatever is in the fridge at their leisure. 

23:54
Okay, so that is what I had to say to set the record straight, to apologize to anyone who'd taken my former advice too seriously to get right with the concept of the kitchen work triangle and Lillian Galbraith, hallowed be your name. You are a lady we should all respect and know a little bit more about. You weren't wrong, but the situation you were planning for isn't exactly the situation that we are all dealing with most commonly today. 

24:22
I'm going to carry on covering a bunch of stuff I've never said before, or reorganizing concepts I've described before. In this season, if you have kitchen specific questions that have been on your mind, I would love to get your input on them. Reach out ASAP. Because, like I said, I'm trying to batch and get ahead of the game on these things. 

24:42
Next week, I'm chatting with my mid modern remodel friend Aletha Vandermaas of true home restorations, who probably spends even more time thinking about the micro details and person specific elements of a gorgeous mid-century kitchen interior design than I do, because she's an interior designer who does a lot of gorgeous mid-century kitchens. 

25:02
So we'll get her take on what you should know to plan a great mid-century kitchen update, and then we'll be moving on to more mid-century kitchen topics throughout the season. Find the show notes for today's episode at mid mod midwest.com/ 2401 and I'll catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.