This is what our kitchen looked like when we first got here. A bit grim. That quaint range had been in use until a few years ago, apparently. Jimmy the farmer would come in to the otherwise empty house and sit by it. We asked his nephew if it could be repaired. He said flames used to to come out of somewhere they shouldn’t, so no.
We like cooking and we needed a kitchen. It took a further five years to achieve this.
In the meantime, we stripped this out and made a temporary kitchen in its place to tide us over.
So where in the geography of the house to make a kitchen? Actually our farmhouse is two houses. At first glance it’s a typical Suffolk longhouse, but there are two roof heights, and as you look around you see where one has been tacked on the the other, not even very well, but long long ago. One must have come first but both houses are classic medieval three-cell format: buttery, pantry and hall, and they join around the chimney stack. This looks like it was always there yet it quite possibly wasn’t.
People gather and cook around a fireplace, and when we fixed up the inglenook in the back house (the one further from the road, and likely the oldest. Let’s call them back and front) it was evocative to find an iron ring that mounted the pot crane in its back wall, hooks and bars for smoking hams higher up, remnants of a bread oven, and wear marks in the bricks that attest to years of use, cooking on an open fire. It speaks of a great span of human time, and yet the oddly disconnected way that the chimney is built supports the idea that it isn’t original to the first iteration of this house. People must have been cooking here before the chimney itself was constructed. (Photos above: before, during and after opening the inglenook chimney).
Medieval houses had halls. The word sounds grand today, but our halls were very ordinary. Those old, beamed ceilings are a re-vamp, added in afterwards. Before their insertion, these were two lofty rooms open right up to the thatch, and the smoke from the fire below so they say, trickled out through it. Our hall rooms would have been the kitchens for each dwelling, therefore that’s where the new kitchen must go.
We chose the front house. Below are during and after photos. The entire kitchen project took approx 2 years from start to finish.
