Design for Life: Architect Thom Brisco on what makes a great family kitchen

What makes a successful family kitchen, tailored for real life? We invited the brilliant architect and designer Thom Brisco to share his insights…

“..Our design culture has come to recognise the kitchen’s potential as a celebrated space where all the members of a family can expect to cross paths, to linger, and to catch up…”

We love seeing Naked Kitchens’ cabinets being used in imaginative, bespoke kitchens – and we were blown away by one particular award-winning space which featured in Grand Designs: RIBA House of the Year. It’s a kitchen built into a garden-facing studio – and with its exposed timber beams, floods of natural daylight and our Ladbroke doors in a lovely muted green colour, the space feels wonderfully tranquil and closely connected to nature.

The designers were architects Brisco Loran – we spoke to Thom Brisco about the project, his views on design, and his philosophy that a great family kitchen space can be a place for children – and adults – to learn…

Tell us a little about yourself and your background. How did you get started in architecture, and how did you come to found Brisco Loran?

I used to draw a lot as a kid; churning out endless versions of Sonic the Hedgehog and the odd Tottenham player, before my excellent state-school art teachers helped me to see that I was much better at drawing straighter-lined stuff, that didn’t move, like buildings. With an NHS nurse for a mum, and a road digger for a dad, I don’t think that I ever met an architect growing up, but my older brother had ventured off to Sheffield to study landscape at university, which gave me the guts to follow him up to do architecture.

Graduating into the 2008 crash, I dug trenches with my dad for a summer before finding work with the architect Jamie Fobert, designing the display furniture for Selfridges’ women’s shoe department. I set up Brisco Loran with my partner Pandora after 10 years of work in the profession.

How would you describe the ethos and general approach of Brisco Loran to architecture and design? What do you help clients to achieve?

Whilst I’m grateful for all that I learned across my employment with a pair of prominent firms, I didn’t set out to become an architect to work on projects with luxury budgets in exclusive environments. Delivering small but ambitious schemes for people with tighter constraints has meant becoming adept in recognising, and then elevating, the latent qualities of a home, of existing spaces, and of incoming lower-cost materials and components.

Projects with our domestic clients tend to start with conversations about the volume and shape of the planned rooms, ideas of how daylight will enter, and thoughts on potential connections to the street or garden. Whilst our design process will often produce something unusual that may come to characterise a project, the spaces will typically take form as calm, quiet, and comfortable backgrounds for the books and toys, plates and plants, set to come.

One recent project of yours - Studio Nencini - won you the RIBA East Project Architect of the Year award, and it includes a stunning kitchen featuring some bespoke green Naked Kitchens cabinet doors. Can you tell us a little about the particular challenges of that project and how you solved them – and why you chose to use Naked Kitchens?

As our first project that we would go on to deliver from start to finish, we were fortunate to be briefed by a pair of brilliant artists, ready to trust in a young architect, to deliver the reworking of their home in Norwich. Working with a budget of less than £100,000 we managed to replace a subsiding garage with a new 20 sqm art studio, whilst opening up a series of existing tight rooms to create a generous kitchen and dining space.

With the budget the central challenge, key moves to suppress the costs focused on innovative fabrication and getting hands on. Using a CNC cutter allowed us to create the staircase as a kit of parts before I dived in to assemble it myself. In a similar manner, I worked alongside the client to install the cheap, off-the-shelf, kitchen cabinetry before hanging the Naked Kitchens doors that we knew would provide the crisp finish required to front our amateur joinery.

We had sought out Naked Kitchens with the aim of using a local company and were drawn to the punchy geometry of the circular pull cut outs, which we felt would rhyme with the spherical wall lights we had specified.

Self-built stair and kitchen at Studio Nencini. Photos by Nick Dearden

What do you most enjoy about your work?

Whilst the reasons I practise have grown more complicated, I think ultimately that the joy lies in the drawing; in the thrill of seeing sketches become objects and spaces in the real world that people come to love and depend on. Maybe some of your readers saw the early 90s cartoon Penny Crayon, who could bring to life all the things that she drew. That remains where the magic lives for me, notwithstanding the glacial pace of architecture that Penny skips out on.

What makes a really great kitchen design?

Today I think we preach to the converted when we speak about the capacity of a kitchen as the heart of a home, but it remains worth considering why this is so, and to what end.

Across pre-war Britain, kitchens were built as small, dark, uncomfortable spaces that relegated servants and women to a hidden periphery of domestic life. In looking to redress this, our design culture has come to recognise the kitchen’s potential as a celebrated space where, however momentarily, all the members of a family can expect to cross paths, to linger, and to catch up on a daily basis.

But I think there exists an extended capacity for the kitchen, as an essential space of learning, for adults and children alike. I’ve seen it written that ‘adult education begins around the kitchen sink’ and I think that great kitchen design can grow out of this idea.

A kitchen where children can learn and participate. Photo by Agnese Sanvito

In most homes, the kitchen is where all life happens – so it has to do a lot of work. From a designer’s point of view, do you have one practical tip you can share for improving life in the kitchen?

Expanding on my previous answer, my tip would be to consider how your kitchen layout might welcome the members of a household to participate in its activity together.

Where size, shape, and budgets permit, kitchens can be arranged to welcome children who might initially learn from casual observation before taking on active roles as they become suited to their age. Can you seat kids in sight of cooking? Can you pair up clear stretches of work surface to allow for prep alongside a friend or partner? In time a kitchen might benefit from the ability to elevate children so that they can participate safely beside you.

For decades we have been turning kitchens into social spaces, something like a town’s market square, but a further step would see them envisaged as spaces where we all learn to enjoy, and to take responsibility for, those daily rituals of set-up and sweep-up.

Thom Brisco is an architect based in London and university tutor at the Kingston School of Art.

He runs Brisco Loran architects with his partner Pandora. Their work together can be viewed at briscoloran.com or @briscoloranarc on instagram.

See also:

Design for Life: A contemporary kitchen in a Victorian townhouse by Jake Lai

Design for Life: Dawn Scargill, as featured on George Clarke’s Remarkable Renovations

Design for Life: Jennifer Haslam on The New Naturals and sustainable living

Photo top: Green Ladbroke cabinet door fronts by Naked Kitchens. Photo by Nick Dearden