Here's our baker's rack in our kitchen, although we use it to make coffee, smoothies, and toast instead of baking, but that's not the point. See the vitamin rack on the wall to the left, and the paper towel holder? Look just below that. See the rod with the metal clips hanging from it?
We installed the baker's rack first, not completely knowing what we would do with it, but assuming we could use the workspace. And sure enough, it became a good place for appliances, and cookbooks filled in around the seldom-used microwave on the shelves above.
The wall to the left was blank, and I needed a place to put our vitamins, so narrow shelves made sense there. But the baker's rack was just an inch and a half shorter than the space it was sitting in... we had a little space left. What to do with what's left?
And that's when it occurred to me to hang the rod there, just under the paper towel holder. That's where we hang our kitchen towels where they can dry in the open air beside the baker's rack, largely out of sight under the counter but not in a damp, confined space. It's also good because if we reach for a paper towel, we're reminded to use the cloth towel instead, saving paper.
This is what I call "farmer design," which is the opposite of high design. It's basically how a farmer would lay something out, starting with the biggest or most important things, and using what's left at each step to do the next most important thing.
Farmer Design doesn't create the sleek, clean, sterile places... it creates places and things that look lived-in and lived-with... but that's ok with is... matter of fact, it's better than ok.
Now, it has just occurred to me that "making do with what's left" is an idea that's useful far beyond the boundaries of physical design, in at least two ways:
Making do with what's left assumes that you've done the most important stuff first. And in an era when so many priorities get so screwed up by so many things, the idea of doing the most important things first and working lesser things in around them sounds bracingly refreshing... or maybe even better than that.
The other useful side of making do with what's left has to do with this era in which so much has been lost. The interesting thing about the things that were big before the Meltdown is that most of them were about standard of living, not quality of life. Bigger, not better. I suspect we may find that what's left after the big things have vanished might actually be the important things that were there all along, but which had been crowded out by the big things of that day.
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