That’s very industrial looking machine, more like what I would have expected to see in a light commercial context than a house.
The so called “utility house” and the “garden city” movement hit here in the 1920s which is when we started to see homes with practical, easy to maintain layouts, but they tended to be probably a lot less practically designed than in Scandinavia or the US in that era, as least from what I’ve read anyway.
Architects of that era here didn’t prioritise the kitchen as a centre piece of urban house design. That only starts to happen in the 1950s and from that point on kitchens tended to get bigger, more practical, often more elaborate and became much more of a focal point around which everything else flows.
Before that, the tendency was to try to make them disappear as a functional room that wasn’t seen as something to show off. It was probably because leading architects tended to have grown up in grand circumstances, with little understanding of how a small/average family home might function beyond a theoretical one, and almost all of them were men. So you ended up with nice Edwardian houses designed by aloof Victorian gentlemen, who tended to see kitchens as an afterthought. They were big into creating garden suburbs though, and you’d find most of the homes are long since remodelled inside, but that’s also why a lot of houses of that era (in their original layouts) also tended to have no laundry room / utility areas, so the laundry machines (when they arrived) tended to originally be in the kitchen, or the garage.
From what I gather Scandinavian design was a few decades ahead of us on that kind of thing.
That’s an example of a 1920s street in suburban on the Northside of Dublin:
[this post was last edited: 1/7/2022-08:40]
