#Kitchen and Residential Design: Kitchen desks: absolute necessity or absolute waste of space?

Kitchen desks: absolute necessity or absolute waste of space?

Posted by Paul Anater at 6:20 AM

So the yahoos at Apartment Therapy ran a post last week that touched a nerve. The post was about kitchen desks, but that's not grand enough so they refer to them as kitchen offices. "We spend lots and lots of time in out kitchens and we're so busy nowadays we'd be lost without being able to run our empire from a super cute kitchen office like this one." I'm paraphrasing but not really.

The gushing was directed toward the desk in the photo above. I suppose that if you're a nine-year-old and your empire consists of a front yard lemonade stand, a desk such as that would be fine. For anyone over the age of nine, it's going to come up pretty short.

I rip out kitchen desks so often it's practically a side line. I rip them out and replace them with something meaningful, like a pantry, because nearly every kitchen desk I've ever encountered was the size of the one above. The current owners can't use it as a desk so it ends up the repository for the junk that has no other place to go. Here are a couple of shots from my Before files.