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There was a time, believe it or not, when there were no kitchen trends, no kitchen luxury brands, no specialized consultants and designers, no rococo cabinetry, and no need to gasp at the exorbitant costs. No shelter magazine editor thought about calling the room a focal point or entertainment center instead of a kitchen, and no real estate agent babbled about how much it adds to the value of your house.
The style was restrained and the budget was thrifty. An appliance was merely a device designed to perform a household function. In other words, it was something practical. It was not intended to denote your superior taste or abounding wealth.
Your choice in refrigerators was between an apartment size and a home size. Your range could be gas or electric, in thirty inch or thirty-six inch. And your sink was just like everyone else’s sink, except yours was cleaner of course.
As an example of the changes, just look at the some of the choices in upscale ranges: AGA, Bosch, Dacor, DCS, Five Star, Jenn-Air, Viking, and the irresistible Diva de Provence.
Appliances used to look like themselves, plain and utilitarian. They did not look as if they belonged in a nineteenth century farmhouse or a twentieth century nuclear power plant or even a twenty-first century restaurant in the Time Warner Center.
The change in kitchens might logically have been motivated by domesticity, by the urge to cook and eat at home. But it wasn’t. If anything, we cook less and eat out more now. But kitchens became a sign of our status, along with everything else in our homes, on our backs, or sniffing the curb at the end of those logo embellished leashes. Tastefully and expensively designed, highly styled and recognizable, kitchens became a lifestyle commodity.
Once we have accomplished the goal of making a gorgeous statement with our kitchens, we are left with a dilemma. What do we actually do with them? They are certainly useful in the morning, before we want to leave the house, or if we are not presentable enough for the Candy Kitchen. They are fairly helpful at lunchtime and for poolside snacks also. And if you have kids, making use of the kitchen might even be a necessity.
But what about dinner? If you stay home for dinner, you can’t be at the spots where you should see and be seen. And if you want to entertain at home, it’s one thing to have a little lark in the kitchen with your friends, but quite another to actually get out the knives and bowls and pots and pans, not to mention giving up a polo match to go grocery shopping.
If you have the resources and the extra bedroom, and want to extend your nuclear family, you can always hire a full time private chef. It’s a brilliant solution to one of the challenges of being rich and being in the Hamptons. But it’s not for everyone.
Caterers are a more reasonable answer, although as status symbols they might not match up to your lavish kitchen. A better answer we recently came across is the part time private chef, especially one with credentials. You get all the custom work and you don’t have to live with or bond with the person.
The au courant private chef for summer 2006 in the Hamptons is a man memorably named Florian Francois Victor Hugo. A descendant and namesake of the great nineteenth century poet and novelist (author of Les Miserables), this Mr. Hugo is young and handsome enough to be a romantic hero. But his turf is in the kitchen. He comes from Provence, studied at the culinary institute led by Paul Bocuse in Lyon, and worked for eight years with Alain Ducasse, so he has the correct pedigree.
Mr. Hugo is currently the executive chef at La Panetiere, in Rye, one of the notable French restaurants in America. But he is moonlighting in the Hamptons for the next couple of months, preparing private dinners for a select few and adding star quality to those star kitchens.
The sample menus seem beyond delicious, the presentation is ravishing, and the prices, which range from $75 to $125 per person, must seem reasonable to anyone who’s lived in the Hamptons for a while. Private dinners for a minimum of eight people can be booked through his wife, Michelle Hugo, at (646) 823-4203 or mchellehugo@aol.com.
