A Kitchen with a View

One feature of many U.S. kitchens built in the 1950's is the placement of a window above the kitchen sink.  I recognize that such an arrangement could have been prompted in part by ergonomics, that science of designing workplace objects to fit the size and movements of a person's body:   Because we need to lean forward slightly to reach down into the bottom of a sink, we could hit our heads on a cupboard if it had been placed above the sink.  I am inclined to think, however, that another reason for that window is our general dislike of washing dishes by hand, contrasted with the soothing possibilities a view of Nature can provide when we look out the kitchen window.

Kitchens in middle-class houses built back in the '50's did not usually have automatic dishwashers as part of the original construction.  And in most families I knew, washing dishes was, let us say, not a beloved task.  (When, in the early 1960's my family briefly hired a maid to assist my mother with household work, my sister and I found the otherwise nice woman a bit peculiar when she explained that she would not cook but that she did love to wash dishes!)

I do not have many happy memories revolving around my washing dishes.  But I do have good memories about people enjoying that view out the window above the sink.  When I was a child and my parents were house-hunting , one thing that attracted them to the house they settled on was a graceful, flowering mimosa tree just outside the kitchen window.  And in our previous house, I lost count of the number of times my mother, at the sink, would remark upon a cardinal or other bird she noticed outside.  What my mother saw and commented upon expanded my own childhood knowledge and awareness of the world.  Today, in my own house, my wife and I have a low cherry laurel to gaze upon, delighting ourselves with the antics of the squirrels that clamor upon it.

I know an architect who says he just cannot imagine designing a kitchen without a window above the sink -- it just would not be the courteous thing to do.

In E. M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View, a window-view becomes both the source of the book's title and a symbol for the book's theme of the struggle between social insularity and openness.  The upper-class heroine, not yet married, and on vacation in Italy, finds that the hotel room she is assigned to lacks a good view.  A gracious middle-class man offers to switch rooms so that she might have a window with a beautiful view.  Who will she marry? That generous man's son, or a man who is of her own class but who is shallow? Those social questions are Forster's primary concern, but the relationship with Nature is a sub-theme.  The cinematographer's who made the 1985 movie version took advantage of that sub-theme:  When the young woman, vacationing away from cold England, opens the shutters on that new window she agreed to accept, the beautiful and warm Italian sunshine floods into the room.  And more than light floods into her as well.

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Do you have a view of some aspects of Nature through a window where you live?  Is there a favorite thing you like to see?