The Friends actress Courteney Cox posted footage of her kitchen in a recent Instagram clip detailing a stir-fry recipe. It met with great interest. ‘The soft grain of the natural material, combined with the light brown color, makes for an incredibly versatile style choice. Simply put, the instinct to cover wood with paint should be carefully considered,’ opined Hannah Ziegler in the US edition of Homes and Gardens.

The contemporary kitchen, for those who can afford it to be so, is multi-purpose: a hiding-in-plain sight refuge, but also the family headquarters and a ‘beautiful showpiece’, according to Kishani Perera, an interior designer in Los Angeles.

Those with enough space and cash must decide between a near-infinite choice of backsplashes, on cabinetry, whether to have an island or a commanding table instead; hidden, integrated or displayed appliances; on countertop gadgetry, on space flow, fridge-size, surfaces and finishes, tiles, soft furnishings and lighting schemes.

The latter is particularly important. Indeed, it is ‘the most important thing in every single room’, writes India Knight, the lifestyle journalist and author of Home: How to Love It, Live in It, and Find Joy in It (2025). ‘You can’t have only one source of light because the room will look flat, overlit, unwelcoming and dreadful – a particular disaster in a kitchen.’

Most people don’t have the resources to buy an Italian marble-topped island and bespoke wood cabinetry, nor Knight’s flair for the vintage cosy-chic. A Bulthaup kitchen will set you back about £75,000 at the cheaper end; and Sola, a Scandinavian-style kitchen fitter will cost you more like £160,000.

The pandemic changed everything. The kitchen had to look and feel right for a new breed of very online home cooks. It became a domestic dreamscape: aspirational, functional, where the pantomime, if not the real deal, of hearth and home plays out more than ever. It has become a meeting point for beliefs and goals around wellness, the projection of personal image (and postability on social media), nutrition, hygiene, technology, the environment, personal finances, and family. Mostly, I think, it’s about style, and how stylishly you can harness, or conceal, utility and the messy business of human feeding.

While the new generation of stuck-at-home cooks that Covid produced couldn’t get a new Sola kitchen, they could binge-watch the ever-spawning cadre of ‘food content creators’ being paid to flaunt direct-to-consumer pots and pans brands.

The algorithm inundated people (mostly women, like me) with videos of moreish food being slung together by beautiful people in things that looked a million miles from the scratched Teflon and ancient stainless steel I grew up scraping leftovers from. Brands like Our Place, Made In, Caraway and Hexclad grew exponentially. Their gorgeous external hues came with non-stick interiors that were ‘non-toxic’ – without Bisphenol A – which Teflon contains. This is a big part of their marketing, even though scientific consensus is that non-scratched Teflon is perfectly safe to cook with.

In 2025, Pauline Al-Saed, a former criminology lecturer at Bath Spa University, boasted she was the UK’s ‘poshest thief’ after being caught stealing £1,000 of Le Creuset cookware. This made perfect sense: who didn’t dream of a kitchen rippling with its ‘volcanic’ orange and glossy teal casseroles?

Kitchenware shops like Borough Kitchen, London’s recherche emporium of everything the discerning home cook might need, including the full range of Mauviel pots and pans (copper-handled French cookware founded in 1830 in Normandy), seem to be always full of people. Justin Kowbel, its founder, a former investment banker, told me: ‘We made the right bet. The industry moved faster, because of Covid.’

For most of its relatively short life, the dedicated kitchen wasn’t a place to show off gadgetry, style, social orientation, and wealth. Before kitchen design began in earnest in the early 20th century, cooking, for most of the population, meant food prep near a heat source, storage elsewhere, and baking done in public bakehouses. For the wealthy, the kitchen was only for cooks and servants.

It wasn’t until the 18th century that the first enclosed ranges – fire enclosed in iron – were invented. Enclosed ranges allowed for cooking directly on the heat source and freed up space for baking ovens, but remained the preserve of the wealthy. In 1848, Catherine Beecher, known as the American Mrs Beeton for her books on household management, dismissed the closed range as confined to ‘the settled areas’ only.

Beecher’s observations, however, were formative. She was the first to come up with an idea of kitchen design whereby the room should suit the needs of the woman using it, not the other way round. In the 1910s, an Indiana company launched the Hoosier Kitchen, which, echoing Beecher’s design, marked the first time an ergonomic kitchen layout, not the individual bits and pieces for it, was put up for sale.

Meanwhile, in Germany as it recovered from the First World War, American industrial design was being closely studied. In the 1920s, faced with major housing shortages, German cities produced designs for compact, ‘rational’ three-room homes of living room, bedroom and kitchen. But the ‘Frankfurt kitchen’, the influential design of the Viennese ex-Communist Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, could often feel dark, isolating and pokey. Functional and organised, yes, but it was not a pleasant space to slave in for hours a day.

The long road towards the sunlit open-plan kitchen began in 1934, when Frank Lloyd Wright designed what is thought to be the first open-plan kitchen for a middle-class Minneapolis couple called Malcolm and Nancy Willey; Nancy wanted to cook and entertain at the same time.

The beginning of the contemporary fixation with pretty pots and pans arguably dates to 1963, when Julia Child’s The French Chef aired. She transfixed the world with her home kitchen full of semi-professional, luxurious trappings, including a bubbling stable of Le Creuset pots and pans. After that, people didn’t just want a well-appointed kitchen, they wanted the pretty cookware, too. By the 1990s the kitchen ‘really becomes kind of the most expensive room in the house’, according to Brent Hull, a Texan builder and specialist in the history of millwork.

In a sense, kitchens have come full circle, echoing, in all their expensive glory, the humblest spaces of 19th-century Europe. In their influential anthropological study Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (1952), Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog depict the kitchens of the Jews in the shtetls as astonishingly vibrant hubs: surely more vital and interesting by far than the showy ‘headquarters’ of smart modern homes. As Jewish cooking scholar and cookbook author Claudia Roden describes it, ‘everything’ went on in the kitchen, which was usually just one of two rooms. There was ‘tailoring and making shoes. Sometimes a corner of the kitchen was rented out to a neighbour to carry on his own business. Geese and chickens were also kept in the whitewashed kitchen, which smelled of goose fat. People walked in and out from the street at all times to borrow an onion, to have a drink of tea from the summering samovar and to pass on the latest gossip… At night everybody sat around the table for the light, to a variegated hum of activity – the mother picking feathers with the girls, the boys studying, the father chanting. Sometimes the children or grandchildren slept on top of the oven or on the wooden table’.

To be sure, today’s expensive ‘showpiece’ kitchens, with their highly visible aspirational cookware, their expanses of marble, wood, glass and cork, can be very lovely spaces. They can also be lonely; there is no samovar, and very often, there is no neighbour stopping by. No amount of money, or Instagram clout, can change that.