What does a luxurious kitchen look like for a wealthy American family?
Can you find the refrigerator in the picture?
In the kitchens of wealthy Americans today, people who don't know how to do it can experience a sense of shame. The act of looking for ice cubes can turn the most honorable guest into a hapless thief who rummages through boxes and cabinets, looking for scattered gems.
"I don't think I've had a customer in a long time who wants to expose their fridge," said British interior designer Martin Lawrence Bullard, whose namesake company in Los Angeles has removed big appliances from the homes of celebrities like Cher, Tommy Hilferger and Kelly Jenner. "Every design we've done over the past five years has included hidden refrigerators."
In the homes of the wealthy, many things that are immediately recognizable in the kitchen of the average American family— electrical appliances that can be recognized from their size, shape, and appearance that have not changed since about the 1940s— are increasingly being transformed into cabinets.
Panel-ready built-in refrigerators have become standard, designed to fit (often relying on brackets and screw systems) with custom wooden panels that fit in with the inline cabinetry. Therefore, seeing a newly renovated luxury kitchen cannot immediately determine whether there is a refrigerator inside, which is not only possible, but often a common situation.
Shannon Wallak, founder of Studio Life/Style, an interior design firm in West Hollywood, California, said "everyone" was covering stainless steel with a board. "Everybody," she repeated. Among the customers who transformed the kitchen into a funky cupboard center by Wallak's hand, including actress Hilary Duff's blue-paneled kitchen, there is a refrigerator hidden inside.
Today's refrigerator is like a dragon dreamed of when I was a child, invisible and huge. Wallak said hiding refrigerators in luxury kitchens "takes up a lot of space that will surprise you." She said "a lot of people" would choose to put two refrigerators side by side.
A kitchen designed for actress Hilary Duff, with the refrigerator hidden behind a royal blue cupboard.
Are you going to have a drink?
How much of the rich (far beyond their physical needs) need to be refrigerated and kept fresh in such a large storage space?
Mainly drinks.
"They like to put a lot of drinks at home," said Wallak, whose clients include many people in the entertainment industry. "A lot of it's drinks." A popular drawer design, she says, includes three small refrigeration zones: one for wine, one for non-alcoholic beverages, and one for fresh drinks. Brad knew that customers would also use refrigerators to store creams and beauty products. "Now a lot of people put them in the bathroom," he said.
Owning two refrigerators is not new to American families. According to a 2015 survey by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 30 percent of U.S. households (about 35 million in 2015) claimed to have at least two refrigerators in their homes that were "on and on all the time."
What makes high-end spare refrigerators different is the importance of their (hidden) placement: according to surveys, most spare refrigerators are placed in basements or garages.
The appearance disguised as a cabinet isn't an innovation that only exists in modern times: In the 1950s, GE's advertising copy boasted of its horizontal cooling system, which could be hung "like a painting" on the wall, and there were colors such as "petal powder" and "turquoise" to choose from.
The cost of hiding state-of-the-art refrigeration technology in your home kitchen is very high. Many of Wallac's customers opt for sub-zero refrigerators, which have magnetic gaskets installed on the edges of the inner doors to form a vacuum seal to prevent hot air from entering.
The appliances (which she says "can be sold for $15,000 at random") focus so much on refrigeration capacity that they can sometimes be inconvenient for owners: According to a troubleshooting guide for customers on the sub-zero brand website, while the company's refrigerators and freezers are not designed to be opened for humans, "depending on the strength of the vacuum, it is possible that the doors may be locked."
While the wealthy are scrambling to refrigerate more and more perishable items, Brad says one thing they are increasingly reluctant to do is freeze. "Frozen foods are becoming more and more obsolete," he said. "People like to eat more organically."
"Most of our customers nowadays tend to use only the freezer to make and store ice cream," he says.
Also less popular is the refrigerator with an external automatic water freezer, a feature that allows weary refrigerator owners to drink cold drinks without opening the refrigerator.
Today's ice comes from several types of machines that are individually disposed of on the ground and are specifically designed to make ice of varying shapes, textures, and transparency. The highest-end panel-ready models of these machines can be worth thousands of dollars. If you only have a budget of a few hundred dollars, one of GE's small ice machines can render stored ice cubes in a luminous mosaic-like elegance.
In an episode of MTV's "Celebrity Mansion Show", "50 Minutes" shows the rows of vitamin water in his refrigerator.
There is a cave inside
Since the early 2000s, ordinary Americans have been exposed to high-end refrigerators through reality TV shows. MTV's hit "Cribs" is a documentary-style show in which entertainers (including actors, musicians, athletes and, occasionally magicians) claim to take viewers on a tour of their private homes, and one of the show's signature features is to spy on what's in the refrigerator. (Many refrigerators are mostly drinks, such as the "50 cent" [50 cent] family's refrigerator, which is impressively packed with a lot of vitamin water like a supermarket.) ）
The real housewives series is another window into the design of america's elite home décor. Because the show emphasizes extravagant family life, the actors are always filming in a huge, spotless kitchen.
In 2013, Nini Lex spoke about the refrigerator in "The Atlanta Wife" and published one of the show's most famous monologues. In a close-up interview, she made a distraught look as she described the hotel where she was staying with one of her co-actors: "There's a white refrigerator there!" "Lix spat bitterly, his face full of pain, fear and disbelief." I was like, 'Oh my God! Oh, this white refrigerator doesn't work. Sisters, please wear your shoes. Let's find a place to stay, my dear! ’”
Another "wife," Yolanda Hadid, has a giant glass cabinet full of baskets of colorful produce in her home, which is a striking addition to the Beverly Wives series. Although Hadid quit the show in 2016, the Twitter account @yolandasfridge, which she created during her appearance, still tweets to more than 14,000 followers from time to time as her home's glass refrigerator.
Wallak said that despite Hadid's eye-catching refrigerators, most customers "still don't choose glass panels — even if they want to."
During her role in Beverly's Wife, Yulanda Hadid's neat refrigerator became a hot topic.
The maintenance of all-glass refrigerators is often anti-human. "You have to be very good at tidying up and keeping the fridge extremely tidy," Brad said. "Otherwise the fridge wouldn't look good at all. And such a refrigerator is expensive, worth between $15,000 and $20,000. ”
Hide in full view
Both Wallak and Bullard say the enthusiasm for hidden appliances stems from the fact that kitchens are increasingly being used as casual gathering places rather than just areas for preparing food.
"In the past the kitchen was hidden," Wallak said. "It has a door. All your appliances are there. It was like a workplace. Now, the kitchen is more of a way of life. You want to make it beautiful seamlessly. ”
The kitchen space is arranged "as it looks in the living room," Brad said. "We added artwork. Added expensive lighting. The cooking table has become a modern table. (The real dining table is still confined to a separate, rarely used room.) ）
A sub-zero spokesperson confirmed that the company's panel-ready refrigerators are "especially popular in metropolitan areas." Brad says the fastest way kitchen fashion spreads is through photos on social media. He said that over the past few years, Instagram has sparked a craze for green kitchens.
But some luxury kitchen facilities aren't available to even the wealthiest customers — including the refrigerators they most want to hide.
"Right now, God knows why, you can't buy a refrigerator anywhere," Brad said. "They're almost as hard to buy as cars." Since last spring, the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains, making even regular freezers hard to come by. "At the moment, the goods are delayed for several months," he said, "and now money can't buy them." You can't get the goods to arrive quickly if you spend more money, because there is no goods. ”
Brad's recent job was to buy a dining refrigerator for a customer's chef. "We couldn't find goods anywhere," he said. Eventually, he found a second-hand model. And the final price of this old refrigerator: $18,000.
"You have to buy what you have to buy," he said.