Home Kitchen
Since the turn of the millennium, the kitchen has acquired more and more functions in addition to its namesake purpose; it has become multifunctional. Due to changing lifestyles, the classic separation of homes into their one-dimensional functions – sleep, work, eat, rest – has become increasingly obsolete. The kitchen is increasingly becoming the central living space and thus a status symbol. This can also be seen in the fact that younger generations in particular find a great kitchen more important than a great car. As a result, more and more money is being spent on kitchens: The worldwide annual increase in financial expenditure on kitchens is 30 percent and means that between 25,000-100,000 euros are now spent on kitchens alone.
In the wake of increasingly mobile and networked lifestyles, cooking increasingly stands for a new understanding of luxury – namely, the luxury of being able to take time for creative activities that don’t have to be financially rewarding. Young people in particular see cooking as a pleasurable counterbalance to digitalized work and stressful urban life, with implications for the design of the kitchen: it becomes a multitasking space and is cooking, living and working room at the same time.
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