Cutting to the Chase: Kitchen-Only Tours
by Debra Galant
February 6, 2003
MICHELE JACOBS of Wayne, N.J., recently redid her kitchen. But that didn't stop her from plunking down $45 to see 10 more on a kitchen tour in nearby Glen Ridge. Her stove-filled itinerary was a version of the old house tour, where people tromp through your rooms, oohing, aahing and quietly criticizing your taste, but with a sharper focus.
If you wanted to see stainless-steel six-burner cooktops, granite counters, cabinets nice enough for the Oval Office and refrigerators that literally disappear into walls like secret panels in a haunted house, this was your event. While guests padded around in stocking feet to protect the floors, chefs in toques from local restaurants added calories and a festive atmosphere.
No refrigerator magnets were anywhere to be seen, but envy, competition and regret were as abundant as rooster motifs.
In Ms. Jacobs's case, the regret involved her backsplash. ''I wanted pillars,'' she sighed. ''They talked me out of it. I have flutes instead.'' She had, of course, seen those pillars during the tour.
Ellen Gerard, who helped organize the tour -- which raised $35,000 for the public elementary schools in this picture-perfect suburb 15 miles from Manhattan -- confessed to ''hood envy.'' As in stove ventilating hoods.
There are ample opportunities ahead for coveting thy neighbors' stovetop pot filler. While no one tracks the trend nationwide, kitchen tours are clearly proliferating, especially in areas where people have the leisure time to see how the other half cooks. This spring, tours are planned in Ridgefield, Conn., and neighboring New Canaan; in Scituate, Mass.; and in Sacramento, Atherton, Yolo County, Napa Valley and Vacaville, Calif. Fort Worth, Tex., and Charleston, S.C., will have tours in November.
Some kitchen tourists take in three or four events a year. Last year Carolyn De Lagrave of Coronado, Calif., visited a giant walk-in refrigerator room on a tour in San Diego, drove 10 hours to see kitchens in Yolo County, near Sacramento, then continued on to Napa Valley to catch a tour called Kitchens in the Vineyard. She said she enjoys these jaunts as much as touring castles in Ireland and mansions in Newport, R.I.
Members of a wine-tasting club in Florida made their way north last year to see what was cooking in Spring Lake, a well-to-do town on the Jersey Shore. Meg Whipple, who helped organize the event, said kitchen tours are gradually supplanting decorator show houses. ''I don't think you'll ever have people not interested in looking at other people's homes,'' she said.
Kitchen renovation is a competitive sport in the upscale suburbs, at least among women of a certain taste, with access to a certain income. The contest pits designer against designer, contractor against contractor and -- most of all -- wife against wife, in a decorating arms race.
Based on surveys done by Remodeling Magazine, the national average for kitchen renovations is $43,000 -- and that doesn't even buy you any granite. For kitchens of the custom cherry cabinet and granite countertop variety, the national average is $70,368, said Nina Patel, who covers kitchen trends for the magazine. And numbers like $150,000 are not unheard of.
The centerpieces of these kitchens are the Viking six-burner professional gas stovetops, almost inevitably in stainless steel. These brutish-looking appliances have the same expensive bulky aesthetic as S.U.V.'s -- and seem to serve a similar purpose. Just as the average suburban Expedition driver doesn't tool around in the backwoods very often, neither does the average suburban Viking owner often whip up meals for 100. But it definitely looks cool.
And having a cool kitchen is as important as having the right car or the right watch, since kitchens these days are the most public part of the house. The kitchen/great-room combination has become the center of casual entertaining. So the Viking stovetop is as important a piece of décor as the Thomasville mahogany dining room set of the 1960's or the Seth Thomas grandfather clock of the 1840's. ''It's a showoff thing,'' Ms. Patel said of the professional-grade appliances. '' 'See what I have.' ''
Furniture-quality cabinetry is another prime showoff item. At the kitchen tour in Glen Ridge, the woodwork showed the greatest variations in taste. There was the almost rococo cabinetry of Claudia Berg's kitchen -- designed by Edith Leonardis of Morristown, N.J., who has also done kitchens for Ronald O. Perelman and Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey. It featured a recurrent rope motif, ornate corbels and turned legs on the kitchen island. And its opposite: the spare Arts and Crafts-style oak cabinets with library handles in the kitchen of Angel Schade. Getting inside Mrs. Schade's recently rebuilt mansion (which replaced a historic Tudor-style house that burned in a fire two years ago during a renovation) was almost everybody's real reason for plunking down $45, although few people were tacky enough to mention it.
During the tour, many of the decorators and contractors involved in the kitchens stood quietly by, with the modest and helpful bearing of 19th-century kitchen servants. Dave Leonard, co-owner of the Kennebec Company in Bath, Me., which designed and built Mrs. Schade's kitchen, had driven through icy rain in Rhode Island in order to attend. ''I felt like a mailman,'' he said wryly.
Mr. Leonard, dressed in elegant Maine country gentleman attire, was able to show off features of the Schade kitchen that the casual visitor might miss: the 700 Series Sub-Zero refrigerator, for example, which was hidden, along with a full-size freezer, behind the dark-stained cabinets. One pities a new baby-sitter thirsty for a Diet Coke. Or, as Mr. Leonard pointed out mischievously, ''It's not a good drinking man's kitchen.''
In several of the houses, the refrigerators and freezers were not only well hidden, but spread around the kitchen -- a drawer with cold soft drinks over here, a drawer with frozen pork chops somewhere across the room.
Evidence of children and pets was hidden as well. Mrs. Schade keeps her children's sports schedules and school lists taped to the insides of their individual lockers, in the mud room. ''We never had a refrigerator with magnets,'' she said.
Ms. Whipple of Spring Lake, who attended the Glen Ridge tour, was -- like many others -- unsure whether to be jealous of the 10 kitchens on display, or slightly appalled. ''I think it's beginning to get a little over the top,'' she said. Then she took it back.
She hinted as to the next direction these specialized house tours might take. ''My bathroom's really awesome,'' she said.
