The Kitchen Within
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.