Why does the significance of this late 20th century invention remain unrecognised?

Along with the Pill and the motor car, this design idea has been an agent of great social and cultural change.

Why not combine cooking, eating, relaxing and chatting as a family within a single great space?

It’s an invention of the late 20th century, and its proliferation across the country is now all but complete. Along with the Pill and the motor car, it has been an agent of great social and cultural change. And yet its significance remains largely unrecognised. I’m talking about the kitchen-family room.

A case could be mounted that versions of the kitchen-family room – the KFR, surely – existed for thousands of years in tribal huts across the globe where family units prepared food, played games, told stories and relaxed. And yet for almost 200 years we Australians persisted with an essentially English design for housing that comprised a kitchen, loungeroom and multiple bedrooms.

In poorer households meals were always eaten close to where they were cooked, in the kitchen. Only the well-to-do had dining rooms. After the meal in the pre-KFR era the family repaired to the loungeroom, to the sitting room, to the good room, for a spot of cribbage, for listening to the radio, for a cup of tea.

I credit the Greeks and the Italians for awakening Australians to the idea of indoor-outdoor living, which perfectly suits the climate. I also credit the women’s movement for creating the conditions necessary for the proliferation of Australia’s KFRs. Women returning to or remaining in the workforce injected spending power into the home, and introduced new ideas about how to manage a household – like, for example, the notion of shared cooking responsibilities. Indeed, why not combine cooking, eating, relaxing and chatting as a family within a single great space?

In this new space mothers, fathers and later teenagers could stride the galley between the cooktop and the island bench while chatting with family members and also keeping a watchful eye on the telly. The KFR was made for modern day multi-taskers.

This new idea of how to live in a family home was a radical departure from the status quo. The cook and the kitchen were separated from the family in well-to-do English homes. Here was a social division reinforced by design that was later transported to the colonies.

Even in early versions of Australian homesteads, the kitchen was often designed as a bolt-on to the main living quarters due to the fire risk of an always-on combustion stove. How liberating must have been the latter decades of the 20th century, when families reimagined how they might live.

The KFR works in Australia because it is functional and inclusive; it underpins and enables our modern way of life. And yet it did not exist 60 years ago. It prompts the question, what new ways of thinking have the capacity to change how Australians live in the future? Maybe an empowerment of children, of teenagers, could arise in a world of falling fertility, forcing a reallocation of space and resources within the family home. Maybe geopolitical tensions will heighten our sense of and need for perimeter security.

One thing is for certain: the KFR is a design idea that provides Australians with every opportunity to interact more fairly and more easily, I think, than had been the case previously. And all the better when the KFR flows seamlessly into its equally modern mate, the alfresco living space.