Our good friends at KBB Review in the UK decided that as there was little hope of enjoying any further rugby at the World Cup (sorry Tim) they would stir the hornet’s nest in other ways – read this!
“Leading independent retailers have accused architects of treating kitchen and bathroom design as a “retrofit irrelevance” and claimed most would rather manage the entire project themselves than work with a KBB specialist.
A straw poll of some of the UK’s top KBB designers found most had experienced major problems working with architects and said their approach to kitchens and bathrooms was often dismissive.
“I’ve been designing kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms for 30 years and have yet to come across an architect who can design any of the above,” insisted Peter Humphries of Connells in Ipswich. “Architects should stick to designing homes and extensions and leave the interiors to the designers. The answer is to work together, not to run the designer down.”
Kitchen designer Johnny Grey, who trained at the London Architectural Association, said part of the problem was that architects are taught only to look outwards. “What they don’t learn so well is to look inwards,” he suggested, “to understand the emotional needs of how people live, work and play in their homes.
I’m doing a project at the moment where the architect isn’t very well organised and uses us to take on the management of a project. Then you have architects who get very jealous about the design and create a lot of problems for you, because they want to control the aesthetics.
“One of the reasons I’m quite often limited by the projects I do is because if you get a very status-driven architect, they don’t like other designers on site. So they push aside anybody who’s got a vision or a skill.”
Glasgow-based KBB designer Colin Wong agreed that “most commonly, architects treat kitchen design as an afterthought, a retrofit irrelevance and not really part of the fabric of the structure”.
He admitted he had often successfully collaborated with architects who “acknowledge the importance of the kitchen designer and consider the overall function and feel of a space from the outset”.
However, he went on to claim that the more usual scenario was for the architect to simply to “create a box and instruct a designer to retro-plonk a kitchen into it later”.
Responding to these concerns, Neil Wilson of Neil Wilson Architects in central London, said: “If designers aren’t listening to me and providing what I want, then I won’t use them. But if they do listen and they’re intelligent, then I will.
“There are often cases where we spend a lot of time and effort designing a kitchen and then you go to a kitchen showroom and they want to redesign everything when I’ve spent weeks, if not months, doing it myself. I don’t want them to change it. I want them to draw it up, price it, do CAD drawings and go from there.
“I don’t really use a kitchen designer per se. I want their product, I don’t really want their input. But that’s me, I’m a design architect, I’m doing a lot of residential work. It’s a full service to the client and I don’t want to hive off bits and give them to other people, which happens far too much in the industry, from project management to lots of other roles, and kitchen design could be one of them.”
So – who’s right? The design architects or the kitchen designers – or is there a case where both could be right? Have your say
