A bit about me …

Hello! My name is Erica, I am a law graduate turned Cordon Bleu diploma’d cook/chef. I’ve worked as a cookery teacher for adult learners, as a trainer of talented women cooks learning how to become professional chefs, as a recipe developer, documenter, and writer, and as a jobbing cook/chef in a variety of kitchen settings – from the domestic to the professional, and including the dedicated, the disparate, the makeshift and the desperate.

I have learned the hard way why good design matters – from my own physical and emotional comfort zones, and in a spectrum of kitchens, spanning the good the bad and the dangerously ugly.

Galvanised by this experience, I’ve studied for (and gained, with distinction) a degree in kitchen design, with some of the best designers currently practicing in the UK, and gone on to be employed by a forward thinking design house dedicated to this fundamentally important space. I have observed up close the strengths and weaknesses within the industry, in terms of the practicalities and realities that apply to different circumstances, bodies, and business models – to put all this experience in the service of designing ‘better’ kitchens.

… and my motivations

I care about how a kitchen looks, but I care more that its shouldn’t look better than it feels and that, above all else, it should look and feel personal to whoever is going to be using it – whether that be an individual, a family, or a community.

I have a desire to improve an involved and often far from perfect design process, and to reconfigure the priorities and power dynamics in the context of responsible design.

I believe that it is necessary to start that process with taking the time to discover the routines, practices and beliefs that will underpin a design’s integrity, and I believe that evaluation of the tech – both its workability and responsibility – starts by understanding the principles on which that tech is created, rather than relying on the face-value of promises and persuasions made by branded suppliers.

A great design will ultimately always be a work that has involved the collaboration of all those with a stake in the end result: users, designers, deliverers, installers, maintainers … – each with a valuable perspective that only they can bring – which means you, me, and all the wider team involved working together to bring a series of ideas, experiences, conversations, and decisions to rewarding, enduring, responsible, life.