Scraps 01: Idealised
Scraps is a new monthly Lecker essay series! This one is available for everyone, and from next month they’ll be paid subscriber only. Thanks for reading.
In Deborah Sugg Ryan’s book Ideal Homes, she describes the first House of the Future to be shown at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in 1928, designed by S. Rowland Pierce and R.A.Duncan:
It was envisaged that such a house would be built on a frame of hidden stainless steel supports. The frame would be covered by a material that had not yet been invented which resembled thin sheets of a horn-like substance that could be tough, yet capable of being cut and welded at high temperature. […] The space of the house was as adaptable as the furniture; four cabin-like bunk bedrooms could be converted into two double bedrooms by use of roller shutters. The beds were heated by powered mattresses and heating throughout the house came from electric panels on the floor. […] The house of the future presented a fantasy of domestic life where everyday household tasks would be automated, and presented Modernism as the rational labour-saving solution for life in the future.
It’s probably because of this that I had a romanticised view of what the contemporary Ideal Home Show would be like.
On arrival at Olympia, I did a five minute walk around the ground flour and was immediately so overwhelmed – by hundreds of exhibitors, things, people – that I slunk back to the Smart Home section to sit on a bench and wait for a presentation. I have actually always found these sorts of events a bit Too Much; when I went to the Podcast Show a couple of years ago I got so flustered at the scale of it that I dropped my glasses on the floor, broke them and then subsequently got ejected from a meeting room where I was trying to put in an emergency pair of contact lenses. Probably not a typical experience of a trade show, but one that’s coloured my judgement even further nonetheless.
The presenter took to the front with great enthusiasm, wearing a headset mic that was positioned too close to his mouth and popped slightly painfully when amplified. He began by asking the assembled crowd how many of us had smart speakers. The family in front of me (mum, dad, two kids) enthusiastically put their hands up and shouted out what they use them for. Music! Timers! The radio! What do you use yours for, he asked, nodding at me. Every single day I ask it the weather, I responded, which cued one long minute of some classic banter about how I could just look out of the window instead, while I smiled tolerantly and shouted “the window doesn’t know what time it’s going to rain” in my head.
He began moving through the exhibits, starting with smart doorbells and thumbprint front door locks, describing a complicated scenario that involved remotely allowing access to his mum’s house for her carers: giving them a code to enter at specific times), but not wanting to scare her by them entering the room unannounced (installing motion sensors in the hall that cause her living room lights to pulse red for a short interlude - sounds terrifying, but fine.
In the kitchen, a branded smart tap dispensed water: hot, chilled, filtered and fizzy (in different intensities), and a dial allowed him to select the exact desired amount, saving energy and waste. He didn’t make it entirely clear that you could actually do this on the tap itself, instead explaining you could use the app to select these things, and I pictured myself thumbing through my phone next to the sink, frantically stabbing at the screen while I tried to estimate the amount of water needed for the volume of pasta I like to habitually consume.
The main feature of the Smart Kitchen is a huge fridge, probably three times the size of the fridge in my own kitchen, and the four front panels change colour. The presenter informs us that it is the only one in the world and it was sent over from “the guys in the Middle East”, a reference he makes without explanation several times throughout his talk. Apparently you can set the lighting to reflect the weather outside (ironically) but he had to explain to ‘the guys in the Middle East’ that in the UK that would just mean it would illuminated in grey LED every single day, ha ha ha! But you can also manually customise it to whatever colours you prefer, making it perfect for a ‘kitchen disco’. I read in the accompanying leaflet afterwards that the fridge has up to 190,000 colour combinations to choose from. Neither the presenter nor the leaflet elaborate on whether the fridge can actually do anything else.
A robot vacuum with a large dock can apparently empty itself, detect the kind of flooring it’s on, and mop if desired, even swilling out the dirty water collected in the process. The presenter admits that it’s impressive but expensive, coming it at “around £900”. But it’s better than those cheap robot vacuums, he says with conviction, which are too unintelligent to map their surroundings and know where they’ve already cleaned and – god forbid – you have to empty them yourself. I think affectionately about my little robot vacuum, which frequently forgets where it is, gets stuck in the kitchen because of the one inch drop down into it, and sometimes, when I’m not looking, inhales a entire piece of knitting and winds it tightly around its brushes. I am intensely, disproportionately grateful for this flawed piece of technology which still takes off our hands a tedious domestic chore. Someone still has to empty the fancy robot’s dock bin surely. Unless you can get another robot for that. We constantly seem to strive for a new ideal.
The presenter whips through the rest of the display, showing us smart curtains (dunking on IKEA in the process for some reason) and then spends five minutes demonstrating a voice activated Optimus Prime which is actually very cool, even though he has to sneakily prop it up to stop it rolling off the table.
I come away at the end intrigued but with an unshakeable feeling that setting up this technology and troubleshooting any inevitable problems would surely take more time than just using the normal version. We’re allowed to look round the set afterwards and I make a beeline for the kitchen, where the only other remaining features seem to be a coffee machine and an airfryer provided by one of the brand sponsors of the show and one of those cocktail makers that you feed spirits into and receive ‘lounge quality’ drinks at the touch of a button.
The kitchen was designed in long and compact lines like a dining-car and was furnished with a kitchen cabinet rather than fitted cupboards. It contained many novelties. For example, no washing-up need ever be done as disposable dishes, plates and cups would be used. Cooking and freezing would be done by electricity. Pneumatic chairs could be deflated and rolled up when they were not needed. A table in the dining room could be folded and wheeled into the kitchen.
Deborah Sugg Ryan on the 1928 House of the Future (Ideal Homes)
After the presentation I walk around some of the many stands. In prime position is a huge smart tap display with several demonstration sinks and an enormous billboard: photos of a smart, sleek woman wearing a polka dot top and chicly executing various kitchen tasks. She tosses a tomato in the air before chopping it; she fills a transparent pan of pasta with hot water, she raises a glass containing a sparkling clear liquid with ice and lemon to the camera. It’s actually a different brand than the one in the Smart Home set, and I wonder about an Apprentice-style fantasy scenario in which one was chosen over the other through a series of increasingly humiliating tasks. Next to it is a company selling range cookers that look like Agas but are somehow even more aggressively British-branded, and by that I mean you seem to be able to buy doors for them which are Union Jack embossed.
The middle of the exhibition centre is dominated by the Dream Home; a vast, ranch-like construction. At the front, a robot lawnmower trundles back and forwards over a square of Astroturf. “Welcome to the Dream Home!” intones a smiling associate at the front door. Inside, the first thing I notice aside from the grand piano playing itself is a podcast studio: a box enclosed by imitation Critall windows and doors, set up with two armchairs, a table between them and microphones on hinged arms. Two vintage film posters, one for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and one for Kill Bill Vol II sit artfully against the panelled wall. An illuminated ‘On Air’ sign is mounted to the wall. It is difficult to talk a photo of the studio because people are queueing up to sit mutely in the chairs and have their pictures taken. I post my eventual picture on my instagram stories and several radio producer friends find it hilarious, and we critique the soundproofing together, although secretly I now want this set up in my own house.
The kitchen in the Dream Home is towards the back of the house, looking out onto another fake lawn, this one strewn with outdoor furniture and multiple barbeques. It has been supplied by the sponsor, a well-known high street kitchen retailer, and is tastefully if slightly blandly constructed, with off white low cabinets built into an island and a sink unit by the window, and a charcoal wall of cabinetry housing two double ovens on the right. The open plan design showcases two of the brand’s ‘signature collections’, both named after aspirational (unaffordable) London neighbourhoods. The ovens, naturally, have the Bake Off tuck-away doors, and the island houses a huge induction hob and one of those downdraft extractors, and a weird little marooned glass splashback.
The island’s Corian worktop has been staged with a voluminous vaguely Grecian stoneware vase filled with earthy-toned dried flowers, a warm yellow globe lamp, a wooden tray carrying the smallest pestle and mortar I’ve ever seen, and a wire fruit bowl containing an interesting series of ingredients which were clearly on the colour palette of the moodboard but look somewhat bizarre in real life: a red cabbage, several red onions and sweet potatoes, a butternut squash and an aubergine. Afterwards it occurs to me they probably used these vegetables as people are less likely to take them than pieces of fruit.
There are three sales reps in the kitchen: one for the ovens, one for the hob and one for the sink. I hover near the sink and he obliges immediately with a demonstration. It’s the same brand tap as the Smart Home so I actually get to see it in action, and he shows me how neatly the filter and carbon dioxide canister fit into a unit underneath the sink. It is appealing being able to make a cup of tea so instantly but I always wonder whether speeding up the time it takes for a kettle to boil is an improvement that really needs to be made. “The tap is normally three-two but today we’re offering it on special for two-three,” he tells me. My brain doesn’t immediately register the amounts articulated in this way and I think he means hundreds then look at the displayed price list and realise I’m missing a zero. Next to the sink is one of those viral ice cream blenders, and I do a little involuntary sigh as if joining the dots. It’s probably not coincidence that this gadget is so recognisable to me and all of those videos I’ve watched of people transforming tinned peaches into sorbet aren’t just finding me by accident. But maybe it’s less a truly intelligent alogorithm – ‘the For You page is really For You, eh’ – and more ‘this brand have really gone hard on the product placement and influencer marketing’.
I wander around the rest of the house: high end stereo equipment, several freestanding baths, a ‘boot room’, an astonishingly expensive bed that folds into the wall and turns into a desk, then go out of the back door. Outside there is a huge board listing and thanking all the sponsors responsible for dressing the rooms.
Arnold Bennett, the popular novelist, wrote an essay on the house of the future for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue. […] Bennett wrote about the four elements of comfort that needed to be borne in mind when planning the houses of the future: noise, foul air, darkness and cold. HIs recommendations paid little attention to architectural style. Instead he concentrated on the levels of comfort that he believed could, and should, be achieved in the present day.
Deborah Sugg Ryan - Ideal Homes
Every time I open my phone anywhere near the Dream Home one of the smart lights inside attempts to connect with me.
For the rest of the afternoon I drift around. I sit in on a session about growing windowsill pea shoots by the head gardener at a prestigious country restaurant, who admits to the assembled crowd that she’d never planted anything until six years ago, which seems impressive. I queue up for some free tiny jars of Bonne Maman, then queue up again, separately, for a full size one, even though it’s chocolate orange spread which I don’t even really like. I browse the extremely varied and confusing range of exhibitors: everything from pre-fabricated raised covered vegetable beds to heat pumps on the ground floor, venturing upstairs to find a tangle of cut price shoes and cheap clothes. There is a stand where people are sitting in shiny white chairs getting their teeth whitened. Someone is selling the kitchen choppers I always see online, the ones where you slam crunchy vegetables through a blade so that they fall in neat uniform pieces into the attached box below. On their stand are three vast bowls full of demonstration chopped vegetables which I can’t imagine are going anywhere except the bin. Having somehow forgotten about Britain’s track record with food at large public events, I order an £11 souvlaki which is one of the most disappointing sauceless things I’ve ever eaten in my life.
I booked a ticket because it felt like ‘research’. I want to do more writing about kitchens, and so much of my thinking around them is somehow wrapped up in how aspiration reaches us there from so many different sources. I remember how, when I interviewed her for Kitchens, Deborah Sugg-Ryan talked about how she was drawn to studying the archives of the Ideal Home Exhibition from its founding in the 1900s because it was interesting to see both what normal people were interested in seeing and what their aspirations were. Now we’re bombarded by brands and products constantly in our lives anyway: on television, on the radio, on billboards, on buses, and most of all, in our own hands, constantly, on our phones. This wasn’t the case for people 100 years ago; the exhibition would have offered a genuine opportunity to see products and designs and ideas that wouldn’t have been publicly visible anywhere else.
This, though. This doesn’t feel aspirational or innovative or even imaginative. It just feels like a giant series of adverts, made three-dimensional. The back pages of a Sunday supplement, brought somewhat to life.
I try to imagine a well-respected contemporary novelist writing a thoughtful essay that took into account both the format of the exhibition, and how the themes of domesticity interact with their own work. Who would it be?
If you want to hear me talk more about kitchens, I’m delighted to be speaking at Interesting24, a conference full of ‘short talks about interesting things’. It’s at Conway Hall in London on May 15th from 7pm. You can buy tickets here.