Thrilling Tale… Again

It was a dark and stormy night, as the classic fireside tale goes, and we were just starting on the post-dinner washing up. We’d had a preserved lemon pilaf and rosewater labneh from the new Yotam cookbook. Without warning, Francesca launched into a spiel about how inefficient the design of our kitchen is, and continued on about it for the duration of the washing up (which, being in the wake of a Yotam session, took quite a while).

What’s my problem? Well, it was Francesca who wanted the kitchen arranged like this in the first place. I told her the shelving was hard to access and the new bench layout ill-advised, and that she’d want to have it changed before the year was out. Still, it’s ultimately her house so I wasn’t in a position to assert my beliefs on the matter, and she has plenty of coin to throw around chopping and changing her home interiors. I spent the whole evening struggling to keep my lips firmly zipped, so that a self-satisfied ‘told you so’ wouldn’t slip out.

Skip forward to the present time: here we are, lined up for another round of kitchen renovations. Melbourne homes, according to Francesca, must have their true potential realised. She has this thing about them ‘having great bones’, you see. Combine that with her powerful need to sport the latest, cutting edge appliances and on-trend materials, and you have a recipe for a perpetually unfinished kitchen upgrade project.

With integrated technology always being in development and aesthetic trends never sitting still, it’s impossible to achieve a sense of enduring classicism. At the same time, it’s hard to stay on top of these innovations when you’re trying to work everything back into overarching design from the 1950s.

Whatever. If this a kitchen reboot is what Francesca wants, it’s what she’ll have. I do admire her assertiveness when it comes to what she wants, even if it does occasionally result in me having to bite my tongue. That’s the end of the story.