White Kitchen

In the Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the heroine finds herself in the upscale London flat of her sometimes-boyfriend, Mark Darcy, named after the hero of Pride and Prejudice, as Fielding updates Austen’s romance plots for a new century. Like Pemberley, Mark Darcy’s home overwhelms the heroine with signs of wealth. Unlike Pemberley, the flat is not simply an object of desire. Alone chez Mark, Bridget worries that Mark is growing cold to her, an emotional temperature she sees reflected in his enormous and impersonal kitchen where she has to navigate “baffling walls of stainless steel” in order to identify the fridge and to satisfy the hunger pangs that makes her a heroine as relatable in her way as Elizabeth Bennet is in hers. In the film adaptation the steel appliances wink under harsh lighting that also reflects the white walls. 

Mark’s bachelor kitchen, now two decades old, remains the ideal kitchen, the white kitchen of endless contemporary home décor magazines and websites. Although comment sections on many of the sites suggest a fatigue with all that whiteness, and the sites themselves hint that the white kitchen is on its way out (often to be replaced by light gray), the vision persists, embeds on the retina.

Backsplash

What are these kitchens and what do they look like? To answer the second question first, they are, well, white. This means the cabinets, the floors, the walls, the counters and the backsplash. In “before and after” sequences, whiteness replaces the many shades of brown of wood cabinetry: oak, pine, maples, cherry, and artificial renditions of all of these. Wood-colored cabinets are “dark,” “dated” and sometimes, simply, “awful.” Hillary Farr of HGTV sees what she calls “stained wood grain cabinetry” “distracting” from the “design” of the kitchen. It is hard not to hear the “stain” in “wood stain” here. 

Backsplashes—for those unacquainted with the term, these are the usually tiled area behind the sink, whose function is to keep the wall dry-- are particularly vulnerable to transformative whitening:  backsplashes with more than the most muted patterns are often “busy” or, in an attempt at temporal distancing, “80’s” or “90’s” or even “2000’s.” A common design feature is white subway tile, wrenched from its rather grubby context in the New York metro system to protect the cleanliness and brightness of modern kitchens. While of course there are example of subway tile arrangements with a “splash” of color, most are monochrome and get their individuality from the layout of the tile itself.

White kitchens call for brightening or lightening, even in makeovers that sacrifice windows and natural light. While high-end transformations feature the installation of white cabinets and various forms of task and room lighting, more budget-friendly makeovers (or makeovers for rentals) make do with affordable whiteness in the form of contact paper and peel-and-stick tiles. Color is allowed in carefully controlled places—as an accent, for example, in a glowing red fruit bowl or alternating black and white floor tiles. It is relatively rare to see the word “color” not preceded by the noun “pop” as if color is a bubble designed to disappear.

The white kitchen is also a bare kitchen. Counters are empty, appliances “housed” in a cabinet, an appliance shed or an appliance garage. These latter terms quarantine the appliances, exile them, linguistically and visually from the house. The white kitchen is a place of invisible labor—typically there is no sign of food or of the tools needed to prepare it. The exception seems to be pots and dishes, which are displayed empty and shining, their purpose to reflect light. A white kitchen is a clean kitchen, clean beyond the scope of any human effort. The cleanliness of the white countertops, whether they be marble, synthetic stone, or contact paper, is incompatible with images of sponges or spray bottles or baking soda. It is a cleanliness that comes from newness and persists as a sign of non-use. The white kitchen is about the absence of work, although it would take almost endless work to maintain. Someone, one assumes, has to whisk the appliances out of the way, scrub the countertops until they gleam, sweep the floor of crumbs or onion peel, keep the children (or the adults) from leaving dishes or cereal boxes on the kitchen island. Like all fantasies, this one persists precisely because it is impossible in real life: the kitchens that are hardest to clean are the ones we see at their cleanest.

Of course, the ultimate sign of invisible labor is the fact that these pictures almost inevitably fail to include human beings, human bodies. We do not know who does the labor of cleaning this kitchen: what raced and gendered bodies do the work of whitening. The polished surfaces of counter, refrigerator, bar stools reflect not the human faces of those who clean them but other counters, other appliances, in an infinitely receding hall of mirrors.

The homescape without people is of course common in most photographs on real estate listings and home décor magazines. There most common justification is, of course, that photographs should allow viewers to project themselves into the scene. This follows the logic of “home showings” by real estate agents. Potential sellers are encouraged to make a home as neutral as possible so that potential buyers can “see themselves” in the space, without the interruption of family photographs, books, quirky collections, or colored walls. To “stage” a house involves erasing the personalities of the people who have called it—indeed made it—a home.

As someone who has sold several houses over the years, I look at photographs of white kitchens and imagine the people who exist somewhere beyond the edge of the image: those maids, those repair people, those builders, those children and dogs exiled like the toasters to a sort of appliance garage for live things—perhaps to the garage itself. Of course, one set of people at the edge of the frame—the photographers, shoot directors, etc. are evident to savvy viewers. If you read the comments section of online before and afters, many respondents complain that the “afters” are often taken from a different angle, or with different (usually brighter) lighting than the “befores.” The work of those who shape the image is of course meant to be invisible, to dissolve as it were into the whiteness of the kitchen, but it can leave its traces even in that whiteness.

It is hard when you click on these images and stories not to compare the pictured rooms to your own. Many of us would be happy with the “before” kitchens, especially since they tend to have more storage and to seem to work better for cooking. I have, since moving after Hurricane Harvey, a slightly off-white kitchen that, before I got my hands on, and my fingerprints all over, it, could have been an “after” in a website or a magazine. My kitchen has off-white cabinets up to the 13-foot ceilings; each of the many cabinet doors sports carefully chosen “vintage” hardware of the sort that home décor experts say give an otherwise bland room personality. It is an aspirational kitchen in two related senses: it is lovelier than any place I could ever have imagined cooking in, and I have a hard time living up to it. The “up” in “living up” is, in turn, both literal and figurative. My builder built the kitchen of his dreams, and he is at least 6’5’’. Before we moved in, if I had to come see the house, he would leave the keys for me on the transom to the kitchen door, which, it turns out I could only reach with a ladder. When we moved in, I could not reach the second shelf of my own cabinets. But the kitchen dwarfs both of us, myself and the man who designed it. The cabinets that circle the ceiling actually erase the height difference between us; he has built a kitchen out of reach.

I have said, “my builder” and “my kitchen.” The kitchen is, for all my addition of china and plates in the greenish blue that my family and friends refers to as “my” color, the builder’s kitchen, Anthony’s kitchen, his signature. A few weeks after moving into the new house, I took the dogs for an evening walk around the neighborhood and passed a house I knew also to have been built by Anthony. I had seen the outside of the house before in the daytime, but now it was evening, and I could see parts of the inside lit up like a film set. And there was “my” kitchen, with identical off-white cabinets and vintage hardware, built up to a ceiling cut off from my voyeuristic gaze. It was my kitchen, only cleaner. Anthony’s dream kitchen.

Whitewash

Lovers of white kitchens will, of course, object that not all shades of white are the same.  They will note that I have repeatedly used the term “off-white.” This is true, but also perhaps my point. White, which chemically speaking is supposed to contain all colors, comes, if we linger in the lexicon of home décor, in more shades than do, say, blue or red. Sherwin Williams, a paint line often used in the “before and afters” offers one example not only of the array of colors that are categorized as white, but of a dazzling variety of names for those colors. There are animal names and natural references: ibis, whitetail, kestrel, snowbound, alabaster, cross categories of the living and non-living forms. Some, often those derived from place names, use multiple words, like the classically inspired “Roman Villa” or “Greek Column.” These, that imply a classical origin of whiteness reflect and deflect from people to built environment, from skin (Greeks and Romans were not dazzlingly white) to stone. There are also, in all senses, domestic whites, including “welcome,” and my favorite, because it so neatly amplifies the problem of separating white from brown while retaining the flavor of the kitchen, “white flour.” The food category produces an explosion of names and shades, derived from if not intended for the kitchen: chamomile, biscuit, champagne, and oddly specific steamed milk. Names can be nouns or adjectives, “white” can be part of the name or only implied. Stand- alone names—those without “white”—suggest the capaciousness of the term. Are biscuits white? What about chamomile? Is steamed milk a different color than cold milk or milk left out all morning on the kitchen counter?

While some come from a natural lexicon that emphasizes the rare and precious (pearl, diamond), many of these point to moral attributes that are yoked to whiteness: “restful white,” “pure white” are perhaps predictable, but whites are also “polite,” “spare,” “modest,” “reliable,” and “smart,” to name just a few examples. A small minority of morally charged names are in fact abstractions and therefore nouns--think “patience.” 

If you look not at the names but at the colors, you see that white varies in intensity and shade, some versions crossing into what might be other colors. “Navajo white” is noticeably darker that almost any other shade; it is the closest I found to directly naming a skin tone, although like “Roman villa” it might also invoke, or use as an alibi, particular forms of vernacular architecture. 

An amateur looking at the “white” palettes at Home Depot might be forgiven for seeing yellow, brown, blue, green, and pink. While there will always be in-between shades of colors that push against the coherence of any taxonomy, a glance at white palettes conveys to my eye not so much variety as absorption, even dominance.  In answer to the google question what is Navajo White, a potential home decorator would get this answer: “ a cream, warm white aint that has beige and yellow undertones. . . It definitely does not look like a ‘white’ paint color but it is very pretty when paired with brown, reds, and taupes.” The same function warms that “Navajo White” by Benjamin Moore is a “completely different color,” that “reads almost like a beige-yellow.” The post advises, “If you have a lot of natural light and you’re going for a Mediterranean vibe, this is your white.” Navajo white has come a long way from the U.S Southwest—and a long way from white. 

Backlash

What can we say about the dominance of whiteness in home décor at a historical moment of (re)surging white supremacy? Are these two things in any way linked? While certain architectural styles—brutalism and mid-century modernism, for example—have been linked by historians to racist ideologies, I think the connection here is less direct.  Nonetheless I feel that at this moment the recurrent, even obsessive, use of the phrase “all-white” demands our attention, even for homes and kitchen. While I don’t have the expertise to do the sort of step-by-step historical work that Chrys Ingraham does in her history of wedding culture, White Weddings, that ties the whiteness of weddings to institutional racism, I do feel that in this era of racial backlash, there is something to say about decorating and renovating to eliminate or carefully contain color, often through technically dubious means (contact paper on counters; chalk paint on tile; all kinds of probably not very long-lasting paint on all wood/brown surfaces). Perhaps I am reading too much into all this, but I do see a fundamental longing, reflected—in all senses-- in this trend for a whitened world. 

When the world—that is to say the sofas, the bedding, and the kitchen cabinets—are indicatively not white, color is often consigned to home-dwellers and decorators of color. Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle’s style section featured on its front page and image of a bedroom with blue and green walls and red and orange paintings. “Black Joy Inspires,” announced the headline, whose sub-head explained “Katy designer part of a team creating vibrant pieces for Pottery Barn’s artists’ collaboration.” The first word of the article is “colorful,” although the word turns out  to modify, somewhat anticlimactically, the “nesting bowls” available at Pottery Barn. Anecdotally, “before and afters” featuring color refer either to “Boho” or “African-inspired” styles.

What I am not saying, is that white people painting their homes white or choosing a white kitchen are in themselves. an act of racism. And I do see new colorways on the way—kitchens in home decorating websites becoming slowly and often palely) green. I see a lot of pushback against the white kitchen in comment sections. But this relatively long moment of home fashion continually and relatedly identifies whiteness, cleanliness, and order, often using the pandemic as an opportunity to advocate for a “restful”—that is to say, not distracting, that is to say white—home. It is hard not to talk about homes and the kitchens in them even in the most banal of contexts, without loaded words, without speaking of the clean and the dirty, the gender of labor, and the highly racialized history of ownership, security, and privacy.