6 days ago
The new status symbol? It's a dirty kitchen
The new luxury among people with pockets deep enough doesn't sound luxurious at all: a dirty kitchen.
Those in the know can confirm that a dirty kitchen isn't an excuse for filth but rather a take on the scullery: a multipurpose secondary kitchen concealing the less aesthetic nuts and bolts of modern life. According to Emma Sims-Hilditch, a Cotswolds-based interior designer and former film producer who worked alongside Ridley Scott, it's all about accommodating 'preparation and unglamorous chores such as pot washing and culinary storage'.
As formal dining rooms have been relegated from everyday usage, kitchens have become less 'kitcheny', evolving into open-plan living spaces that spill into lounges, where hosting and hanging out sit on a par with these rooms' original purpose: cooking.
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Yet the middle-class realities of these more informal dining experiences — laissez-faire get-togethers draped around a kitchen island where assorted dinner party detritus accumulates and hosts end up trying to maintain a conversation above the clatter of clearing up — become precisely the antithesis of the relaxed, sophisticated evening that said hosts were trying to orchestrate in the first place. Indeed, nothing ruins a perfectly curated chichi living and kitchen space like actual food preparation and all the mess that goes with it.
The collection of (often intrinsically unbeautiful) gadgetry that inhabits the kitchens of 2025 — from the chunky air fryer to the bean-to-cup coffee machine and four-slice toaster, all with trailing wires — has sparked a desire for an adjoining dirty kitchen. This keeps the main (or 'show') kitchen as an immaculate space dedicated to hosting and socialising, plating and performance — and undisturbed by the day-to-day running of the house.
This bourgeois detail isn't 'necessarily some flashy new trend — really just a return to how the best houses have always been run', says Lindsay Cuthill, the co-founder of the Blue Book estate agency. 'Go back a couple of hundred years and any serious country house would have had several kitchens: a pastry room, a scullery, a main prep kitchen. These were practical spaces, tucked well out of sight, so the cooking — often hot, messy and full of strong smells — didn't drift into the formal parts of the house.'
That same thinking is coming back, Cuthill says. 'Whether it's a private chef or the owner doing the cooking, it's often happening in a fully kitted-out second kitchen nearby, leaving the main space spotless, calm and ready for entertaining.'
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Set up in the 1930s, the interiors studio Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler is the oldest decorating firm in England, often considered the originator of that elegantly layered English country house style of pattern, carpet and comfort. The joint managing director Philip Hooper has a dirty kitchen in his Georgian pile in Somerset but finds the term 'a bit of a weird euphemism'. Rather, he sees these rooms as 'a prep kitchen, a servery, a pantry all rolled into one' — a place for veg storage, for chopping and peeling, and the necessary accoutrements of refuse and recycling — while 'the more glamorous side of preparation and cooking will happen in the main kitchen, where you can show off your culinary skills'.
'They do function side by side but they also function independently of one another,' Hooper says. 'So the dirty kitchen will actually have most things that the main kitchen has but on a smaller scale. [At home] my eating room has the Aga in it and the prep kitchen has got everything else in it.'
The firm transformed a former rectory in the Cotswolds (the home of the film producer Pippa Harris), adding a second, dirty kitchen as a separate space. While both have 'that plain English type of look' (ie classic Shaker-style frames), the dirty kitchen is delineated with blue painted cabinetry and 'much more forgiving' black granite worktops, a foil to the main kitchen, with pale stone-topped cabinets in Paint & Paper Library's shade Stone V and a dining table made by Petter Southall 'which you clearly wouldn't want people chopping things up on'.
At Blakes, a high-end kitchen designer, dirty kitchens are often hidden behind glazed doors leading into the main kitchen, or even a Narnia door, which blends so well into the cabinets that you barely see it. According to Magnus Nilsson, Blakes's lead designer, frequent client requests include a secondary dishwasher, sink and draining board, plus plenty of storage 'for your air fryers and juicers and all of the machines that you don't necessarily want to have on show in an entertainment space', alongside microwaves and, in fully blown set-ups, a supplementary oven and hob. Nilsson adds that the focus is on reducing the cost and increasing durability. He often specifies worktop materials such as the composites Caesarstone and Silestone or heatproof ceramic, and says that 'in the main kitchen, it's all about showpieces of marble'.
In north London the interior designer Andrew Griffiths (founder of the studio A New Day) works predominantly on large-scale renovations in neighbourhoods such as Hampstead and Highgate. 'Where the square footage allows [the dirty kitchen] is absolutely something that we are seeing become more popular,' he says.
A New Day recently put the finishing touches to a dirty kitchen as part of a project in north London. 'It's a much smaller, enclosed space than the main kitchen, with no outside windows,' Griffiths says. 'When you open the double doors it acts as an extension of the kitchen but it's also very discreet, so you can close the doors and it looks a bit like a cupboard. Day to day, it's a space where the dogs can feed and water but, at the moment the clients have friends or family over, it kicks in as that secondary kitchen space that no one sees apart from the hosts.
'Aesthetic-wise, it ties into the kitchen, but the materials are a bit lower spec and the quartz worktop means you're able to shove dirty plates and wine glasses down, and not worry about them for four hours until hosting is done,' he says, meaning the Carrara marble-topped island remains unblemished.
