The kitchen is undoubtedly one of the most important spaces in the home and is the centre of activity in family life, a place to create, feel and live. Every person that knows how to cook as well as enjoys to, also knows that it is very important to have a neat and organized kitchen. A kitchen must fit your overall home interior and exterior design style, as well as it has to be tailored to your likes and preferences. Current design trends mark the introduction of new materials into different kitchen components, such as glass countertops, fronts or shelves, and designs adapted to meet storage needs, with pillars, tall cupboards and integrated domestic appliances. In this collection of modern kitchen Ideas you are going to see marvelous, new design ideas of contemporary kitchen interiors.

Kitchens in Antiquity

The houses in Ancient Greece were commonly of the atrium-type: the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard for women. In many such homes, a covered but otherwise open patio served as the kitchen. Homes of the wealthy had the kitchen as a separate room, usually next to a bathroom, both rooms being accessible from the court. In such houses, there was often a separate small storage room in the back of the kitchen used for storing food and kitchen utensils.

In the Roman Empire, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy Romans had relatively well-equipped kitchens. In a Roman villa, the kitchen was typically integrated into the main building as a separate room, set apart for practical reasons of smoke and sociological reasons of the kitchen being operated by slaves. The fireplace was typically on the floor, placed at a wall, sometimes raised a little bit so that one had to kneel to cook. There were no chimneys.

Early medieval European longhouses had an open fire under the highest point of the building. The “kitchen area” was between the entrance and the fireplace. In wealthy homes there was typically more than one kitchen. In some homes there were upwards of three kitchens. The kitchens were divided based on the types of food prepared in them. In place of a chimney, these early buildings had a hole in the roof through which some of the smoke could escape. Besides cooking, the fire also served as a source of heat and light to the single-room building. A similar design can be found in the Iroquois longhouses of North America.
In the larger homesteads of European nobles, the kitchen was sometimes in a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building, which served social and official purposes, free from indoor smoke.