This article is part of our Design special section about new design solutions for healthy living.
The architect Veronica Schreibeis Smith designed her first “wellness kitchen” in 2016 in an effort to help tame the overwhelming experience of new motherhood. Her own, not a client’s.
“I was struggling to nourish myself and my family,” Ms. Schreibeis Smith said recently from her office at Vera Iconica Architecture, the Jackson, Wyo., firm she founded in 2010.
“I was buying healthy, more expensive food, and it would just go bad,” she said. “I realized as a designer my kitchen was sabotaging me.”
The tenets of what would become wellness kitchens, a concept that has since spread internationally and become one of the firm’s calling cards, came about after she enlisted a local private chef, Evan Mack, for guidance.
The two peered at the ingredients label on every can, bag and box of food in Ms. Schreibeis Smith’s kitchen in Jackson. “If it had something in it that we couldn’t recognize in nature, we removed it,” she said.
When they eventually started looking at trickier things, like cabinets, they got closer to the root cause of the sabotaged feeling.
In Ms. Schreibeis Smith’s kitchen, as in many others’, the storage spaces had been designed to address an earlier generation’s needs.
“They’re based on the postwar era, when we were buying a lot of highly processed, shelf-stable foods,” Ms. Schreibeis Smith said. Those foods got stashed in dark, closed cabinets and drawers that preserved them for months or years, an unappealing prospect to home cooks who have learned to value fresh ingredients.
Wellness kitchens amount to a bid to fix all the design flaws that may be undermining our efforts to feed ourselves healthfully. If we provide ways to nourish good habits, the thinking goes, those habits will stick.
In a Vera Iconica wellness kitchen, fruits and vegetables from the neighborhood farmer’s market find space in temperature controlled shallow cabinets with glass doors, encouraging their prompt identification and use. Space may be reduced for frozen dinners and cans of green beans, the staples of yore, but does not disappear.
Instead, freezers are used for keeping homegrown ingredients like summer tomatoes handy year-round. “If a client buys crates of fresh blueberries in the summer that they want to eat all winter, they may actually require more freezer space to preserve these foods,” Ms. Schreibeis Smith said. (Ms. Mack said the Vera Iconica kitchen team preferred European refrigerator brands like Liebherr “for its BioFresh and HydroBreeze technologies,” and Miele “for its SmartFresh and MasterCool technologies.”) Pantries get filled with less perishable good-for-you ingredients like root vegetables, oats and dried legumes.
Other signature wellness kitchen innovations include humidity controlled “growing cabinets” for planting and maintaining live herbs and lettuces, filtered water at all taps, compacting composters and islands engineered to allow multiple cooks to chop and dice together, encouraging socializing at home.
But those elements are not all-or-nothing. The Vera Iconica wellness kitchen team — Ms. Schreibeis Smith; Blair Costello, the director of interiors and healthy living; and Ms. Mack, chief creative brand director — has distilled 17 key design principles. Among them are placing kitchen windows and doors to invite natural light and using sustainable, nontoxic materials for painting and cabinetry. Each can be adjusted to fit a homeowner’s aesthetic, lifestyle and budget.
For example, a high-tech gadget they recommend for coaxing kitchen gardens to grow by bathing them in magenta light and soft music is not strictly necessary. Neither are the hushed appliances they endorse for reducing noise pollution.
“If you’re in your 20s and live in a shoe box, what we recommend is, go and buy yourself a $2.99 rosemary plant,” Ms. Schreibeis Smith said. “Use it in your eggs or as a garnish. When you pluck something fresh and living, it has a massive ripple effect. It resets your relationship with food.”
That reset can enhance health, both physical and mental, she said.
Laura Freeman, the principal interior architect and designer at Merits Design Group in Atlanta, said the mind-body connection was a major selling point.
“I love the fact that mental health has become a part of the conversation around kitchens,” she said.
In Ms. Freeman’s wellness kitchens, creating an atmosphere that cultivates a healthy attitude means clearing surfaces of all clutter and letting loads of natural light in.
Juicing enthusiasts and mocktail mixologists may add a custom “beverage station” where they can tuck away Vitamix blenders and NutriBullets.
Outdoor spaces get a lot of attention.
“A Weber grill parked in the corner of a deck” no longer cuts it, Ms. Freeman said of the desire to extend a bracing backyard experience into the kitchen. “Clients want more outdoor light coming in, the chance to feel the breeze on their skin. It’s a physical thing. It does something to our cortisone and stress levels.”
The ambience can be similar to that of a yoga studio. “You don’t go to a yoga class in a tight little room where everyone’s crammed together,” she said. “You want a space where you can feel a sense of openness and possibility.”
Wellness kitchen clients who reach out to Matthew Coates in his Seattle and Los Angeles offices often are looking for a way to make mealtimes more thoughtful and communal in addition to healthier.
Mr. Coates, the president and principal architect at Coates Design Architecture + Interiors, said kitchens had become a household’s spiritual center.
“That’s why I think the term ‘wellness kitchen’ hits home,” he said. “Cooking becomes an entire event. It’s about sharing and socializing with each other.”
What wellness kitchens do not aspire to, he added, is efficiency. Grab-and-go, individually wrapped snacks and microwave meals give way to a more thoughtful approach to satisfying hunger, one that involves a willingness to invest in prep time.
At Vera Iconica, Ms. Schreibeis Smith knows that a leisurely pace can be a hurdle. “Our lives are busy,” she said. But “you can set up an environment where the right choice is the easy choice.”
She does not consider it her role to “control, forbid or remove staples from our clients’ lifestyles,” including microwave ovens, she added. Instead she adopts the “nudge theory” to lead people to healthy options.
“How are you interacting with your kitchen?” she has asked clients from Denver to Majorca. “Do you like being in there? Are the colors lovely? Does it smell nice?”
Getting rid of the quick-fix attitude that can contribute to poor diets may depend on the answers to those questions, she said. But it is fully achievable.
“A wellness kitchen doesn’t have to be unaffordable or overwhelming,” Ms. Schreibeis Smith said. “That’s the one message I would love people to hear.”
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