Gerard Mercator is a name you might not be able to recall from Middle School Social Studies, but he is the 16th Century Flemish mathematician and cartographer who famously figured out how to display a 3-dimensional world on a 2-dimensional map – the Mercator Projection. Mercator himself was somewhat of a rags-to-almost-riches story (it wasn’t easy to become rich making maps) and was considered the Prince of Cartographers in his own day even though he never traveled on a ship.

As Mercator gained some success at his trade, he was finally able to contemplate building a house for his growing family, and here his story is a lot like many of ours: budget for the necessities and plan for the future. He contracted for the design and construction of a ‘comfortable and grand dwelling suitable for an honest citizen of modest fortune.’

His was not an unlimited fortune, though, so the minimum requirements were set as ‘the essentials for maintaining the household…such as a kitchen, a store for food, bedrooms, cisterns…’ Mercator had reason to hope that his fortune would continue to grow, so he laid in provision for ‘entertaining, the amenities of life, ornament, and magnificence such as porticos, halls, courts, dining rooms, a third floor, pleasure gardens, and orchards could be added as time passes and opportunity and convenience arise.’ We can assume that ‘opportunity and convenience’ meant more money!

Mercator was planning ahead, and contracted that the ‘plan of the whole work be drawn up at first.’ We call this a Master Plan, and Designed for Downtown understands that budgets are today what they were in Mercator’s day – rarely able to absorb the whole picture in one view. But it is still important to plan for the future and to leave room for additions and improvements to accommodate ‘the amenities of life’ as ‘opportunity and convenience’ allow. Give Design for Downtown a call to start planning the present essentials and the future additions now for your home renovation or custom home.

My parents had a custom home built for our family back in the early 1960s (I was very, very young). The house had the latest modern conveniences, especially in the kitchen. One of those conveniences was a pantry with a two-level lazy Susan to conveniently present whatever my mom was looking for with a simple spin of the wheel (sometimes it presented me, if I was playing on the lazy Susan at the time. We younger kids thought this was fascinating - no more going down to the cellar for the flour or sugar.

It all seems so primitive now, though, as the pantry has become 'a kitchen within.’ The Pantry is a room of its own, sometimes even expanded into a Scullery Kitchen as today's kitchens are approaching truly gourmet level. For most folks today, the pantry is an overflow area to the kitchen, and is designed to look and to serve as not merely a storage area, but a mini-kitchen in itself.

If the pantry is still a cabinet, it is a bank of cabinets with roll-out shelves to make reaching the stuff in the back much easier. Sometimes it doubles as an appliance garage, with the microwave oven, toaster, blender, and mixer in place, plugged in, and ready to use. But if space allows, the pantry becomes its own domain, with open shelves, coffee bar, microwave station, and loads and loads of storage. A second sink, and even a second dishwasher, takes the load off the main kitchen.

Sometimes we announce the pantry with a frosted glass door, other times we hide it completely with faux cabinet doors - but it's there, and it has taken on an outsized importance in the modern kitchen, the 'kitchen within.’

We at Designed for Downtown, LLC strive to incorporate the latest labor-saving and user-friendly features in our renovation and custom home designs, including the most beautiful as well as most functional pantries.

Give us a call today to start the conversation about how to make your kitchen work better by adding a 'kitchen within.'