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March 1973. "Petoskey, Michigan. Kitchen of the Walter O. Briggs house. William Henry Kessler, architect." 35mm Kodachrome by the Balthazar Korab Studio. View full size.
Parts of this remind me of my mother's kitchen, which was built in the '60s.
One idea that seems "new" for the time and is still a great feature today is the range without an oven underneath it. Separating the oven and putting it into the wall, raised up off the floor, is genius. I have my own kitchen modeled after that same approach. Never will I have to break my back to get a turkey out of the oven! Also I think the aesthetic is better. You don't have this giant metal contraption breaking up the lines of the kitchen.
I see a dishwasher and a trash compactor, but I can't find the oven. I'm sure I'm just missing something obvious, but where is it?
[Under the photographer, along with the fridge. - Dave]
I hate to disagree with archfan, cause I'd usually be wrong. But I found two photos of the updated kitchen in the Oct 2024 Architectural Digest article to which he provided a link. Gone are the door to the outside, wall phone, and Whirlpool Trash Master Masher (I've never known anyone who used theirs for very long). Everything else is replaced, except for the overhead yellow cabinets and possibly the flawed ventilation over the stove. Here is a photo looking from the sink, back into the house. You can see the vantage point from where the 1973 photo was taken. I guess cooking odors were supposed to be blown up there.
[Those are new cabinets over the range. - Dave]
The house is impressively ahead of its time in that the kitchen is in the heart of the house (see window placement) and has a premium view. The house sits on Mukeequa, part of L'Arbre Croche Club.
I am generally quite immune to my impulses being manipulated by images, but I genuinely want a hotdog with mustard, and a pile of fries with ketchup now, right now.
I can virtually smell the formaldehyde.
This type of hood exhaust is still very common, many have the outlet in the top of the hood. The idea, I think, is that the metal filter will condense out the grease, and the rest of it - smoke, etc - is not a big problem. So it's filtering out the hard-to-clean grease residue. Sort of. It's cheap and easy to install because you don't have to run a duct. I don't know how well it works, I have a ducted version.
The cottage was just restored, as described in Architectural Digest. They attempted to restore the feel from the original architect - William Henry Kessler - while modernizing the contents. No photos of the kitchen, but you can glimpse it from the dining room photo (and what a view of Lake Michigan!).
This would have been the lake cabin of Walter Briggs III, whose grandfather Walter I owned the Detroit Tigers, and turned Tiger Stadium into a palace to watch Hank Greenberg, and whose father Walter Jr. owned the team briefly before being forced out (with a court's help). Aside from a few plastic orange dishes, there's no sign of Tiger loyalty in this room.
The exhaust fan over the stove goes through the cabinet above it and then directly out into the room again?
Contractor: OK, you're going to need a ventilation system over the stovetop. Do you want one that vents outside, or one that filters about fifty percent of the smoke and twenty-five percent of the odors and spews the remainder out the top of the cabinet back into the kitchen?
Customer: Which is cheaper?
Upscale '70s kitchen with the KitchenAid dishwasher and Thermador cooktop!
[And a Whirlpool Trash Masher! - Dave]
I grew up in a Fifties kitchen, and this looks shiny and new to me. This is what I imagine George and Jane Jetson's kitchen might look like.
Like the guy in The Graduate says, "One word: plastics."
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