A kitchen just for show??

[DancingLions]

Browsing FB and a post comes up. Family looking for a cat sitter. Pretty regular home. But the person then goes on to say they've had a new kitchen extension built but no ones allowed to use it! Even them!

Apparently they use the old kitchen to do all their food prep and cooking, which they now call the utility and the new kitchen is literally just for show. What madness is this? Spending thousands on an extension to house a show kitchen?

Has anyone else done this? What is the logic? I mean yes I can see they want to keep it looking nice but a full kitchen unused is an expensive ornament!

It's definitely a thing in uber rich American houses/apartments. I've seen it on Kardashians when they open a door to reveal a tiny kitchen full.of staff making the food, whereas Kendall chopped some cucumber in her mum's kitchen once & it was a big deal 😂
It's mentioned a lot.in the super high end real estate shows on Netflix because of you are spending millions on a house or apartment you probably won't be doing your own cooking

Very normal in Asian homes a wet and dry kitchen.

Exactly. The people I know who have two kitchens and are not ultra-wealthy are Asian or Jewish and very frumm. Both kitchens are used, though — it’s just that the smellier, oil-splashier cooking takes place out of the way in the case of the
Asian families, and obviously there’s meat and milk kitchen usages for observant Jewish people.

Having a kitchen you don’t use at all is a bit footballer-y. DH used to work in PL football, and it appears to have been not unusual to have a vast empty show kitchen with a single butternut squash in a bowl on show, while hidden away somewhere was somewhere much more ordinary stuffed with Coco Pops and white sliced bread.

In LM Montgomery books, set in early 20thc Prince Edward Island, lots of farmhouses have a ‘summer kitchen’ which isn’t in the main house, presumably to keep extra heat out of the living areas in warm weather.

Our neighbors have this. They have a gigantic kitchen with expansive surfaces covered in white marble. When I asked if they were worried that it would stain or etch, they said that they didn't actually cook in that kitchen. They have a back kitchen that is attached. The cooking happens there. To add, they don't do the cooking, the staff do.

Yes, in wealthy houses in 19th-C North America, there would usually be a semioutdoor "summer kitchen" so the heat of cooking didn't warm the house, and the indoor kitchen was the "winter kitchen".

When I get my dream house (it's never going to happen, but I can dream), I'd love a proper walk-in pantry, a scullery with extra sinks, oven and fridge space, and somewhere to do messy garden tasks like washing out pots and taking cuttings, and making compost mixes, and growing seeds on the windowsill, and somewhere comfy for all the cats to sleep, and... and...

But that isn't a "show kitchen" arrangement - both kitchens were working kitchens, just used in different seasons.

This is a much bigger take on shoes that aren't for walking in and jewellery that's kept in the bank, isn't it 😂 I bet they have a car they don't drive, as well!

When we were looking round our flat prior to buying, the family had a new bathroom which they never used (in fact they used the shower as a storage cupboard) and a cracked, very old bathroom they all used.🤔

You see this in expensive London houses. One "utility kitchen" upstairs or that you enter via a back door. It's for the nanny and the children to use. Then the show kitchen for hosting "kitchen suppers". Fully equipped but no cooking or food prep actually takes place in there. The fridge usually has things in it though!