Farmhouse kitchens are nothing like their brochure images

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

You’d have to wonder if all of these people who crave a country-style kitchen have ever actually been in a real farmhouse.

Because the farmhouse kitchens I’ve seen are functional facilities, designed to deal with the traffic of muck-caked boots – not some sort of fantasy room created by Laura Ashley for people who have a sort of Disneyland view of rural life.

And yet every property show on the telly has a couple fawning over this farmhouse kitchen idea – a room that will be the focal point of their massive barn conversion complete with little stream flowing past their perch of home-grown potatoes.

Every auctioneers’ brochure emphasises this country-style kitchen – even in the heart of the city – with its Shaker-style units (whatever they might be when they’re at home) and ideally an Aga range to turn this aforementioned living space into a veritable sauna.

A real farmhouse kitchen might have a single armchair of a certain vintage in front of the range or the open fire – primarily for the use of the man of the house – but otherwise seating would be at a premium.

Functionality would be foremost in the mind of the designer (this designer being the woman of the house) and the only prerequisites would be a fridge, a cooker and a telly so you can see the main evening news from the comfort of the room’s solitary seat.

Units would be at a premium and if they had Shaker characteristics, it less a deliberate design style and more to do with the effect caused by doors hanging off hinges.

That’s not to denigrate farmhouse kitchens by any means – they are the most welcoming, warm, sociable spaces you could ever hope for and given that what we could alternatively call the sitting room or the parlour is normally reserved for a better class of visitor than me, they are also at the heart of the home.

But most of these house buyers or design gurus would recoil at the notion of an actual country-style kitchen as opposed to this anaemic version invented by some interiors expert who wouldn’t know a farmhouse from a flying pig.

The other thing they all want in their dream home is wooden floors, once a symbol of abject poverty but now a gem to be unearthed under the carpet that signified middle-class standing for a previous generation.

If you went into a house a generation ago and it had exposed floorboards, you’d have assumed that this was a family who had fallen on hard times.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.