#Planning an Outdoor Kitchen

Why do bad outdoor kitchens happen to good people? It’s a question I ask myself every time I walk around otherwise gorgeous residential landscapes and see poorly planned grill islands, view-obscuring pizza ovens, and homely rows of unnecessary appliances. It’s a question I ask myself when I stand in front of the grill at my own family’s vacation house and can’t find a place to put a spatula, let alone a plate of food. I’ve seen enough bad outdoor kitchens that they now fall into recognizable categories for me, including something I call the Mushroom, that oversize island that looks like it appeared suddenly after a heavy rain; the Utterly Inadequate, which is epitomized by my family’s Weber standing all by itself on our big back terrace; and the Full Vegas, a category that doesn’t really need an explanation, except that the words “retractable television” are often involved.

The owners of this Camden, Maine, home love to throw large dinner parties, so Rockport-based designer Deborah Chatfield kept the design simple. “They wanted the feeling of Tuscan loggia, so we used stone and had our cabinet maker build a long wood table,” she says. Photo by: Tim Street-Porter.

I can recognize a bad kitchen, but that doesn’t mean I know how to design a good one. To help me understand how, I turned to people who do. Here’s what I learned from Russ Faulk, vice president of product development at Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet, a company that makes grills and other appliances; Eric Groft, principal at the landscape architecture firm Oehme van Sweden; and Mark Scott, principal at his own landscape architecture firm, Mark Scott Associates.