I grew up mostly in houses but have been in New York City apartments the last few years. Plenty of things are different. The one nobody warns you about is losing the window over the kitchen sink.
It’s not that I spend hours washing dishes, but when I’m standing at the sink I like to see out. It doesn’t have to be a view. A little sky, somebody walking past, anything that isn’t the room I’m already in.
This isn’t a thing I ask of the refrigerator. I’ve never wondered why the stove doesn’t get one. But put me at a sink facing a wall and suddenly I have opinions about the architecture.
What surprised me is that I’d taken it for granted. Somewhere along the way, a window over the sink stopped being a feature and became part of what a sink was.
So who decided it before I did?
The obvious answer is light. Before kitchens were lit from every direction, putting a window near the sink made sense. But that still doesn’t explain why the window ended up directly in front of the person doing the dishes.
And apparently, even a hundred years ago, people had opinions about that too.
In 1929, Architectural Record argued against putting the sink under the window. The space above it could be used for storage, and besides, it said, “A person washing dishes does not have time to look out.”
That may be one of my favorite sentences ever written about a kitchen.
Of course she has time to look out.
She is standing there.
Seven years earlier, the Department of Agriculture’s model kitchen for the 1922 Better Homes campaign had taken the opposite position. It recommended putting the sink under or near a window for “coolness and view.”
Not just light.
View.
Somebody had already decided that the person doing the work might want something to look at while she did it.
So no, it wasn’t one person. It was an argument, and the view won.
Dishwashers came, kitchens got brighter, and the window could have gone. It didn’t. People renovating kitchens still move layouts around to keep it, and real-estate listings still mention the view from the sink, as if that’s a feature.
Which, apparently, it always was.
Back in my apartment, nobody was thinking about the person at the sink. They were thinking about how to fit a kitchen into a hallway. The dishes get done. They aren’t suffering.
But I’ve come around to the 1922 position.
The person doing the dishes should get a vote on whether she has time to look out.
