About the authors: Donald E. Silvers - Moorea Hoffman

 
Twenty-five years ago, as food director for a large charity organization, I was forced to learn the basic principles of kitchen design. I was responsible for creating 4,000 to 6,000 meals per day in a kitchen designed to generate 500 meals. To make matters even more difficult, during my first two years there, 90 percent of the food was donated on a daily basis, so a planned menu was impossible. I was in serious trouble.

Many architects contacted by the organization volunteered their help. I received more than a dozen plans to redesign the kitchen. Despite having answered hundreds of questions put to me by the architects, none of the proposals seemed adequate. It became clear to me that, since none of the architects cooked, none of them actually understood how to make this kitchen work. As I rejected one plan after another, they threw up their hands in despair. Finally, the organization’s director told me to design the kitchen myself. I was petrified. “I’m not a designer, I’m a chef!” I told him. “You know what you want and what you don’t want,” he replied.

Fortunately for me, the noted architect/philosopher Buckminster Fuller happened to be visiting. The director asked him to see me. “Bucky” found me knee-deep in a kitchen brimming with stacked boxes, crates, and bags. As we stood in the last available two square feet of empty space, I explained my dilemma to him. He responded by asking me the following question: “How do you take space and make it usable for small or large numbers of people?” He began to talk about how a space flows and on how many levels it can flow. Since there obviously was no room to expand horizontally, he started me thinking about expanding vertically. The two floors below the kitchen lay empty and unused. I decided to turn the lowest level into cold storage space for low frequency items. The floor just below the kitchen opened to the street. I decided to turn that into the fresh food storage and prep area, and I installed a conveyor setup that allowed crates to be rolled into the kitchen from the sidewalk outside.

Essentially, Bucky taught me to break down functions in the kitchen, give those functions the necessary space, and make sure those spaces worked not only on their own but in relation to one another. The advice has served me well not only as a chef but as a designer. It has helped me to develop a principle of kitchen design that I’ve used ever since. Call it “Silvers’ Law:”

A functional kitchen has the ability to take a given space and expand or compress the capacity of that space so it can respond to a given need at a given time.

While still in elementary school, Moorea Hoffman was surrounded by a marriage of food and design. She remembers visiting construction sites with her contractor father and helping out in her mother’s catering company, Decadent Dining, as early as the age of seven.

Moorea began her apprenticeship in design with her godfather, Donald Silvers, while studying at Scripps College. During her junior year, Moorea lived in Aix-en-Provence, France where her interest in cooking developed into a passion. She took cooking classes with the renowned chef, Bruno Ungaro of the Amphore restaurant. It was during this experience that her love of cooking an interest in design coalesced into the desire to follow in her godfather’s footsteps as a kitchen designer.

After completing her Bachelors degree in English Literature, Moorea went to work for Expo Design Center selling grills. She quickly moved to appliances and from there went to countertops, cabinetry, and finally, design.

During the years she worked in retail, she continued to train one-on-one with Don Silvers, CKD. Her extensive appliance experience was an integral part of the revision of Kitchen Design with Cooking in Mind.

Moorea then went to work for The Great Indoors as a kitchen and bath designer. In 2004, she joined Don as a partner in Kitchen Design with Cooking in Mind, where she co-authored Kitchen Appliances 101: What Works, What Doesn’t And Why.

Moorea lectures extensively throughout the country.

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