A tiny kitchen from 1926 with big ideas for your apartment

What was the Frankfurt Kitchen?

In 1926 the architect Margarete Lihotzky had to fit a whole way of cooking into 1.9 by 3.4 metres for Frankfurt's new affordable flats. Six of her ideas still work in a small UAE kitchen today.

Frankfurt was building affordable homes as fast as it could, and the kitchens went to a 29 year old architect from Vienna. She married the architect Wilhelm Schütte a year later, which is why the history books list her under both surnames.

What she drew became known as the Frankfurt Kitchen, and nearly a century later designers still study it.

Source: Wikipedia: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Small, and built about 10,000 times

About 10,000 were built for the new housing estates around the city. Each came with built in storage, a gas stove, a swivel stool, a fold down ironing board, an adjustable ceiling light and a removable rubbish drawer. One complete example now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which tells you how seriously designers take a small kitchen.

Source: MoMA: The Frankfurt Kitchen

Trick one: plan the route, then the room

The room measured 1.9 by 3.4 metres, laid out as two narrow facing runs. That shape was a deliberate attempt to cut the number of steps the cook had to take, in the efficiency obsessed spirit of the 1920s. A sliding door even shortened the walk to the dining table.

Try it at home. Write down how you cook a normal weeknight dinner: fridge, sink, board, hob, plates. Your units should follow that list from one end to the other, so nobody crosses the room carrying a dripping pan.

Source: Wikipedia: Frankfurt kitchen

Trick two: one long worktop beats three short ones

In a small kitchen, every break in the counter steals the prep space you need most. A tall unit in the middle, or a fridge in the wrong spot, can cut a good worktop in half.

Push tall things to the ends of the run. Keep 60 to 90 cm of clear counter between the sink and the hob if you can. That strip is where you will chop, mix and plate almost every meal.

Trick three: store things where you first use them

The Frankfurt Kitchen had a row of labelled bins for flour, sugar, rice and other staples, right at the work surface. The flour bins were made of oak, because oak kept the mealworms out. The rest were aluminium, and when most of these kitchens were ripped out in the 1960s and 1970s, the aluminium drawers were often the only part anyone kept.

Today that means spices by the hob, boards by the sink, plates by the dishwasher and mugs by the kettle. It sounds obvious. Count the steps a cup of karak takes in your kitchen and see.

Source: Wikipedia: Frankfurt kitchen

Trick four: go up, not out

A small floor still has a lot of wall. Many UAE apartments have generous ceilings, and wall cabinets that stop well short leave a dusty ledge for nobody. Take them to the ceiling and keep the things you use twice a year on top.

If an AC bulkhead or a duct runs along the top of the wall, a fitted unit can step around it instead of stopping under it. You gain storage without giving up a centimetre of floor.

Trick five: let things fold away

The Frankfurt Kitchen's fold down ironing board has modern cousins: a pull out worktop, a flap table on the wall, a bin hidden in a drawer or small appliances behind a pocket door. Anything that disappears when you are done makes the room feel bigger.

Trick six: fit the people, not an average

This is where the Frankfurt Kitchen stumbled. It was planned for one adult cooking alone, and it was too small for two people to work in together. In the 1970s and 1980s feminist critics argued that it shut the cook away from the rest of the home.

Your kitchen has a big advantage: it only has to fit you. If two of you cook, leave room to pass behind each other. If the children do homework while you cook, an open side with stools keeps them close. If you are tall, raise the worktop. That is easy when the kitchen is made to fit.

Source: Wikipedia: Frankfurt kitchen

Which layout suits a small kitchen?

A straight run or a galley suits most small kitchens, because both keep the walk from fridge to sink to hob short. An L shape works well when a window or a door sits in the middle of one wall. A U shape only pays off when the room is wide enough to open doors on both sides without hitting each other.

Try it on your own walls

Measure each wall from corner to corner and mark the window, the doors and the water point. Then draw your walls in the kitchen planner and watch the estimate add up line by line. Rough sizes are fine. We fix the price after we measure, and nothing is paid before you confirm.

Getting quotes from other makers too? Read how to compare kitchen quotes first. And for the bigger picture, here is why custom kitchens cost more than catalogue ones.