Body Friendly Design The Principles of Kitchen Ergonomics

The word "ergonomics" comes from two Greek words: "ergon," meaning work, and "nomos," meaning "laws, customs, conventions, or principles."

The word is used to describe the science of "designing the environment to fit the person, not forcing the person to fit the environment."

It's not new. We have been practicing ergonomics since at least the discovery of fire. We needed fire to compensate for our lack of a nice warm, furry pelt.

The science of ergonomics is very new. It emerged during the Second World War in studies of how to make weapons easier and more efficient to operate and was finally given a name and recognized as a discipline in 1957.

What is Ergonomics?

Ergonomics includes all aspects of the human-environment relationship, from the physical stresses body motion places on joints, muscles, nerves, tendons, bones, and the like to environmental factors that can affect comfort and health.

It has gotten a lot more attention recently in connection with improving the environment for persons with physical limitations, but it actually applies equally to everyone.

As a species, we really are severely limited in what our bodies can do. Compared to the other great apes, we are weak, slow, virtually hairless, and can't climb trees worth a tinker's damn (old Tarzan movies notwithstanding).

Ergonomics is our way of compensating for all the many things we cannot do.

In kitchens, ergonomics looks at the way a kitchen should be designed to optimize movement during meal preparation and cleanup and minimize stress on the human body while performing everyday kitchen activities.

It is a subject that fills weighty academic tomes. We certainly cannot do more than skim the surface in this article. But we do want to introduce some of the concepts that impact kitchen design.

Some Background

Ergonomics has been around in one form or another for as long as there have been Homo sapiens.

Ancient Persians, Greeks, and Romans did not know they were engaged in ergonomics when they decided on optimum chair and table heights or the width of their donkey carts and chariots, and the heft and length of their swords, but they almost certainly were.

The Pioneers

It was not formally applied to home economics until the early 20th century, when pioneering home ergonomists began studying kitchen work, although they were not called "ergonomists" then. It is only with hindsight that we realize that what they were doing was ergonomics.

Lillian Gilbreth

One of those early pioneers was Lil­li­an Mol­ler Gil­breth, a psychologist, industrial engineer, and protagonist in the 1950 classic film comedy, Chea­per by the Do­zen, based loosely on her life as a scientist, professor, and unflappable single mother of twelve.

She began applying rudimentary time and motion principles to household tasks in the 1920s. These led to her subsequent development of the kitchen work triangle, a cornerstone of kitchen design.

Katharine Fisher

In 1925, Katharine A. Fisher, director of the Good House­keep­ing Ins­ti­tute, author, and columnist for Good House­keep­ing magazine, began a series of columns around the theme of grouping kitchen tasks according to purpose and materials.

Her breakthrough concept was that all things needed to perform a given task, including the ingredients, tools, and implements, should be stored where the task was to be performed.

Later collected and published as a cookbook, Good Meals and How to Prepare Them (a minor classic still sold on Amazon today). A comprehensive guide to early 20th-century home economics, the 256-page manual promotes "plain cooking at its finest," emphasizing balanced nutrition, kitchen efficiency, and traditional, wholesome American recipes.

For our purposes here, however, its most important chapters are on how to equip and organize an efficient kitchen. Her breakthrough concept of a "task-centric" workspace is today also one of the guiding principles of modern kitchen design.

The World War of 1939-1945 gave the science of ergonomics a giant boost when the military began to think in terms of not just new weapons but new "weapons systems" with ergonomic interfaces that permitted man-machine teams to work together more efficiently.

Kitchen Design Guidelines

Even before the end of the conflict, these wartime ergonomic concepts were being carried over to, among other things, kitchen design.

In 1944, the president of the University of Illinois, Arthur Cutts Willard, ordered the formation of the Small Homes Council to research housing issues.

By war's end, the Council had already published early research findings on kitchen design, including Technical Series Index No. C5.32R, Handbook of Kitchen Design by Elizabeth M. Ranney.

The Council's research formed the core of the Kitchen Design Rules published by the National Kitchen and Bath Association that set out general guidelines for effective kitchen design.

Read The Thirty-One Kitchen Design Rules, Illustrated, with extensive notes and commentary.

The Sitting Kitchen

Sitting while preparing meals is a concept largely foreign to modern homemakers. In today's kitchens, we stand to work. Most kitchens provide no seating except possibly at an island, and that's primarily for eating.

Yet sitting while working reduces fatigue and avoids back strain.

A sitting kitchen is hardly a new idea. Until the middle of the 20th century, most meal preparation was done while sitting.

Preparing Victorian meals and after-meal cleanup could take 8 hours or more each and every day. So being able to sit while working was not just a convenience; it was utterly necessary.

The countertop was not the primary work surface. There were no built-in cabinets and no countertops. It was usually one or more large, sturdy tables at which all of the food preparers sat. "All food preparers" included every female in the household aged 6 or older. (For more information, go to Understanding the Victorian Kitchen.)

My grandmother was Victorian, born before the turn of the 20th century. Her kitchen was a sitting kitchen well into the 1970s. Its sturdy worktable was the center of all kitchen activity, surrounded by a Maytag gas range (with an oven and broiling drawer that replaced the coal cookstove sometime before I was born), a large Kohler enameled cast-iron sink, a Kelvinator refrigerator, and a large Frigidaire chest freezer on the adjacent mud porch.

She owned some modern appliances like a 1960s Radar Range^®, a very expensive early microwave she received as a gift from the family. It was kept safely and securely in its original packaging in a shed.

Almost all food preparation, except baking, was done while sitting at the table. Baking was task-centered at the Hoosier, a cabinet specifically designed for baking.

There were no storage cabinets. Some of the most used kitchen implements were hung on pegs or stored on shelves lining the walls, but most equipment, dishware, mixing bowls, eating utensils, and small appliances were tucked away in the adjacent larder (which today we would call a pantry), along with Mason jars of pickles, home-canned vegetables, and homemade jellies, jams, and preserves.

The only small electric appliances she owned were from Sunbeam, a Mixmaster^® stand mixer and a Toastmaster^® two-slot toaster. The Mixmaster was stored in the Hosier and the Toastmaster shared a small table next to a window with the breadbox full of Holsum white bread. The table was used only for toast-making, one of my first household jobs as a five-year-old.

It was, if my memory serves, an efficient kitchen, not by design but by trial and error.

Tables were moved a foot this way, then six inches that way until they were in exactly the right place. Items were arranged and rearranged on shelves and pegs and in the larder until they were at their most convenient.

Thousands of meals were prepared in that kitchen until the city tore it down to build a new library on the grounds.

The sitting kitchen survived well into the 20th century.

One of the very first purpose-designed ergonomic kitchens, the Frankfurt Kitchen, designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, was a sitting kitchen. A daughter of the Victorian Era, she could not imagine a kitchen in which food preparers did not sit.

It featured an adjustable rolling stool and countertops at stool height for sitting with ample knee space below the countertops.

A sitting kitchen is still a very viable option.

As the population gets older and its mobility decreases, the sitting kitchen is making a welcome comeback, helped along by a resurgence in appliances that have been or can be adapted for kitchens that facilitate work while sitting.

Very careful ergonomic design is required to avoid hopping up repeatedly to fetch needed utensils or supplies. The goal is to gather the implements and materials needed, sit down to work, then get up to put everything back only when finished with the task.

The Standing Kitchen

Standing while working in a kitchen did not become a widespread practice until the 1930s, when the increasing number of prepared and semi-prepared foods created by the burgeoning food industry had greatly reduced the amount of time needed to prepare family meals.

Kitchens were also getting smaller, then even smaller, and smaller still, until, by the 1950s, post-war housing boom kitchens had become so small that there was literally no place to sit except at the tiny, two-chair "breakfast table," often tucked into a "breakfast nook."

The "standard" kitchen dimensions largely developed during the post-war years assumed a standing kitchen with fitted cabinets and appliances tucked nearly into alcoves.

Unlike the Victorian Era unfitted kitchen, the modern kitchen, with its cabinets and countertop work surfaces firmly attached to the walls, cannot be tweaked and adjusted for a perfect fit. The fit has to be designed and built in right at the start.

The Kitchen as Workplace

The kitchen—unlike most other rooms in the home—is a workplace. The job of preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals gets done there.

Making that environment fit you is the most critical factor in your satisfaction with your kitchen.

It may be beautiful. It may indeed be breathtaking. Its décor of Italian marble, stained English oak cabinetry, and Schonbek Sterling lighting fixtures may evoke unbidden "oohs" and "ahs" from family, friends, and neighbors alike.

But if it does not function well, you will never be happy with it.

Ergonomics aims at making kitchen work more efficient with less fatigue by improving the interface between the human body and the things it needs to interact with to get work done.

The movement abilities of the human body are the fixed parts of the equation. We cannot alter our bodies to fit the environment, not yet, anyway. So, to make work more efficient, we have to do what humans have done for millennia: change the environment.

Every aspect of kitchen design needs careful examination, from countertop heights to the optimum placement of the microwave and dishwasher, and the best depth of the kitchen sink.

The goal is to minimize movement—eliminating or at least reducing the amount of walking, twisting, lifting, bending, stretching, and leaning required to complete a task.

Task-Centric Organization

What good kitchen designers aim for in applying ergonomics to a kitchen is a flexible, adaptable space in which work can be done with minimum wasted effort and maximum efficiency.

Minimizing wasted motion not only speeds the work but makes it less tiring. A kitchen where you'll spend less energy and time bending, walking, twisting, lifting, and cleaning means more energy and time left for enjoying.

As first documented by Lillian Gilbreth more than a century ago, movement is minimized if the kitchen is arranged in task centers organized around the three main meal activities: preparation, cooking, and cleanup.

Merely implementing the basic kitchen triangle to properly locate the work centers in a kitchen reduces the work required to prepare and clean up after meals by as much as 70%.

Food preparation takes place at a work surface—countertop or table—that is large enough for the task. Everything required to complete preparation should be right at hand, including ingredients and the utensils needed to prepare a meal for cooking.

Once the meal has been prepared, it is cooked. The cooking center includes the range, oven, and microwave. Again, everything required to cook the meal should be immediately available: pots, pans, all utensils, and the platters and bowls in which the meal will be served.

Finally, once the meal has been eaten, the remaining task is cleanup. This task center is anchored by the sink and dishwasher and, again, includes everything needed for cleanup within the task area.

Ideally, the cook should not have to step away from a task area to complete the task.

This ideal is the core organizing principle of commercial restaurant kitchens. It is called "mise en place," a French culinary term that literally translates to "put in place" but means "set up for efficiency."

A busy chef barely does any walking. A professional workstation contains everything needed to prepare a meal, all within immediate sight and reach of the chef. This means, among other things, that each area may have a dedicated refrigerator, waste containers, sink, cutting area, assembly counter, and warmer.

A lot of this structure is not needed in a home kitchen. We do not need to prepare any one of twenty entrees, fourteen appetizers, or thirty-one desserts at a moment's notice. So our kitchens do not need to be quite so efficient.

But much of the organizational technology of commercial kitchens does translate well to home kitchens and has even been codified by the National Kitchen and Bath Association into the Thirty-One Kitchen Design Guidelines.

While these guidelines are useful as a basis for further development, they do not quite get us to our goal. They describe the average kitchen for a hypothetical average user. You, however, are unlikely to be perfectly average.

So, a major part of ergonomic design is adapting these general guidelines to you: your height, your reach, your age, your preferred way of doing things, and any physical limitation you may have.

Additionally, a kitchen seldom has just one user. It has several, all with different needs and capabilities. It has to work well for the snack-getter as well as the head cook and for the beverage-seeker as well as the baker-in-chief.

Flexible Workspaces

Adaptability simply ensures that the kitchen space can be used comfortably and efficiently by users with different requirements and differing capabilities.

Are you tall, short, somewhere in the middle? How far can you reach? If you cannot comfortably reach upper shelves, then you do not want to store frequently used items there. If you cannot easily bend to reach lower cabinets, extensive pullouts may be a necessary option in your kitchen.

Your eyesight is a factor in planning kitchen lighting.

Numerous different studies have found that a person in his or her 50s with good eyesight still needs 100% more light to read by than that same person in his or her 20s.

Adaptable to Every User

The need to be able to mass-produce inexpensively in large quantities has resulted in the standardization of many kitchen components to a hypothetical "average" person. Countertops, for example, are resolutely 36 inches from the floor, an average height that actually fits very few users. Most need a slightly higher or slightly lower countertop as an optimal work surface.

Factory-made upper cabinets are designed to be installed 18" above the countertop, a location that works for many users. But for users 5'6" and under, it means that only the lowest portion of the cabinet can be easily reached.

After many years of designing kitchens, we found that a better height for most people is around 15 inches, a placement that does not interfere with the use of the countertop and puts more of the upper cabinet within easy reach, improving primary storage in every task area.

An adaptable kitchen ignores the standard, average, or recommended dimensions and concentrates on making a kitchen fit its users.

Countertops can be as high as 42" or as low as 32" and still accommodate under-counter appliances such as dishwashers. Upper cabinets can be installed as low as 14½" above the countertop and countertop appliances will still fit. (Accessible guidelines require 14", and many accessible building codes have adopted that specification.)

Kitchens should work for every user, not just the primary user, and certainly not just a hypothetical "average" user.

Look at knee space as an example. Designing for wheelchair users requires knee space under the countertop so the individual can get close enough to the countertop to work. Yet, it's also beneficial to able-bodied users because it allows them to sit on a comfy rolling stool while cooking or washing up.

Issues in Kitchen Ergonomics

Certain elements of a kitchen affect efficiency more than others. Some of the most important include determining the right countertop height and arranging storage for the greatest efficiency.

Safety at the Forefront

Kitchens are inherently dangerous places containing electricity and water in close proximity; sharp objects, flame, and hot surfaces. There is almost unlimited potential for accidents.

Kitchens are one of the most frequent sources of fire in the home and are second only to bathrooms as places in which home accidents occur.

Yet, as complex as kitchens have become, accidents and injuries are decreasing in no small part due to better design. And, while ergonomic design is not going to get rid of all of the many opportunities for kitchen accidents, it can help eliminate those caused by unnecessary hazards in the environment.

Workflow

Kitchen design is largely a process of ensuring that the kitchen structure aids rather than impedes workflow.

Consequently, a major step in every good kitchen design is understanding workflow: determining what work is being done, by whom, and the process or processes by which it is done.

Since each cook does it a bit differently, the work that occurs in your kitchen is inherently personal.

But while it may sound complicated, workflow analysis is really nothing more than asking obvious questions. Who will work where, and what work will be done? What motions will be required to accomplish each task? Will you stand or sit while doing these things, and if so, where? What step will follow the initial step in the process, and where will you go for that second step, for the third step?

Workflow should be orderly and, as far as possible, linear so the cook has everything needed right at hand for each step and does not have to criss-cross the kitchen repeatedly to get the work done.

The ultimate objective is to ensure that every bit of kitchen organization and structure—from the physical layout to specific appliance locations to the level of lighting at each task area—helps keep the work safe and efficient.

The Right Countertop Height

For determining the height of work surfaces, we don't care as much about the height of the user as we do about the distance of his or her elbows from the floor. The elbow is the critical hinge governing all lower arm activity—and it's mostly lower arm movement that does the work in a kitchen.

If the elbow is too high above the work surface, you tend to lean forward to put your elbows back in an optimal relation to the countertop.

If the elbow is too close to the work surface, he or she tends to either step or lean back to bring the elbows back into the correct position.

In either case, the back suffers.

If, after preparing Thanksgiving dinner, your lower back is killing you, your countertops are too low. If the pain is in your upper back and shoulders, they are too high.

For most people, the standard countertop height of 36" is not high enough. It was established in the 1930s when people were on average a full two inches shorter than they are today, and it was probably too low even then.

For a few homeowners, however, it is too high.

The optimum height is usually between 33 and 39 inches. We have made countertops as high as 40" and as low as 32", but rarely exactly 36 inches.

There may be more than one ideal height, however.

The best countertop height for most kitchen tasks is 3" below the elbow with the lower arm held parallel to the floor. For chopping, slicing, and most food assembly, this is usually the optimum height. But different work surface heights better fit other kitchen tasks.

A baking center, for example, usually requires a lower working surface. When rolling out dough, you want to lean forward a little to put your body weight into the process so your arms and shoulders do not have to do all the work. Subtract 2" from the base countertop height for the best result.

Countertop adjustment for special needs may be necessary. A person in a wheelchair, for example, needs a countertop height easily accessible from a sitting position, which requires compliance with guidelines for universal accessibility. (More about this subject below.)

Storage Efficiency

The object of ergonomic storage design is to locate storage so that the things you need to accomplish a task are right at hand—not somewhere across the kitchen and out of reach.

Storage design involves three iron rules:

First Use Storage

We tend to store items with like items: bowls with bowls, knives with knives, platters with platters. But that's not how we use them.

Every item should be stored at its point of first use. The bowls you use to prepare food should be stored where food is prepared, not across the kitchen with the other bowls.

Storing things where you use them saves a lot of walking. If you fill pans and pots for cooking at the food preparation center, pots and pans need to be stored where the food is prepared, not where it will ultimately be cooked. The prep area is the point of first use.

Storage Zones

Store the things you use most often closest to where they will be used. Anyplace you can reach without moving anything but your arm is your primary storage zone. The most frequently used items go there.

An often-used knife should be in a block on or above the counter, not hidden away in a drawer. Fetching a knife from a drawer requires far too many motions:

1. Open the drawer.
2. Locate the knife.
3. Remove the knife.
4. Close the drawer.

Arcs of Reach

Image Credit: StarCraft Design Studio"

The arc of reach of a standing 5'6" cook (blue). The most comfortable reach encompasses

• The front half of the countertop.
• The front half of the two lower shelves of upper cabinets.
• The top two drawers of the base cabinet.

The most frequently used items should be stored within this arc.

The cook can extend his or her arc of reach (orange) by flexing, bending, stooping, and standing on tip toe while standing in one place.

Store less frequently used items in this area.

You may, in addition, have to step away from the drawer to open it, which adds yet more motion to the process.

Ideally, primary storage requires just one motion to locate and retrieve an often-used object.

Clearly, we cannot have everything we might need cluttering the counter space, but we can have things we use most often right at hand—and everything else close by—with just a little planning.

The primary storage zone is generally in an area between 30" and 60" high for most people and extends laterally about two feet right and left from the center of your body. This zone includes (1) the top two drawers of the base cabinet, (2) the countertop itself, (3) the wall behind the countertop (hang utensils there), and (4) the two lower shelves of the upper cabinet.

Store the next most frequently used items in your secondary zone: (1) The top shelf of the upper cabinet, in the area below the second drawer of the base cabinet, and (3) on the lower shelves of adjacent upper cabinets. This is the area you can reach by stretching, bending, or stooping without taking a step.

Everything else is tertiary storage—storage you have to walk to or you cannot reach without a step stool.

Only those things used very infrequently should be stored in this zone.

Single-Layer Storage

Storage should be sized so that whatever is stored is in one layer—all out in front with no item beneath or behind another. In practice, that is very difficult to achieve when you only have so much room for your kitchen, but it is at least an ideal to strive for.

A drawer should contain just a single layer of things.

To hold one layer of silverware, for example, a 3-1/2" or 4" drawer is all the depth you need.

For most other utensils, 5" to 7" is adequate. A 9" drawer will hold most bowls and colanders, and a 12" drawer, the majority of your pots, pans, and lids (on a lid tray).

Shelving should follow the same pattern—all items in one, single layer.

You store dry foods, for example, in four general forms: cans, bottles, boxes, and bags. Cans are seldom larger than 8" in diameter or taller than 8." Can storage, then, is 8" deep and 9" high.

Building a pantry 8" deep is a little impractical, but it is possible, for example, to heavy up the hinges and hang a can storage rack on the pantry door. Store bottles on the other door on shelves about 12" apart.

Boxes need 14" of depth and bags not more than 16"—that's the depth of the ideal pantry. But who has enough spare wall for a wide, shallow pantry?

So, compromise and use a pull-out pantry—essentially a wide, shallow pantry turned on edge then set into a cabinet. It is excellent storage when kept to a maximum of 30" wide. At this width, every item in the pantry is in view from one side or the other

Where storing some items behind others is unavoidable, use lazy susans and pullouts, where possible, to bring items in back to the front.

For more information on storage principles, please read Pantry Perfect: The "Can't Go Wrong" Pantry Design and Organization Rules.

Appliance Ergonomics

Appliance designers have come a long way with ergonomic appliance design but still, have a way to go. Dishwashers and microwaves are still the most persistently problematic appliances, with ovens and refrigerators following in close formation.

Dishwasher

The dishwasher is an ergonomic disaster. It's much too hard to use.

You have to bend, twist, and stoop repeatedly to load and unload it.

You have to spend a lot of time opening and closing the top tray to reach the bottom tray. The bottom-hinged door gets in the way of people moving around the kitchen.

It is just not a very user-friendly appliance.

Very recently, dishwasher manufacturers—starting with the New Zealand appliance company, Fisher & Paykel—have started putting dishwashers in drawers, a much more lumbar-friendly design. Still expensive—twice the price of an equivalent standard dishwasher—these are at least heading in the right direction.

Early models seemed to have a lot of technical problems and were prone to breaking down. These issues have been largely resolved, but it took several recalls and at least one class-action lawsuit before a reliable drawer dishwasher became available.

Drawer models do not eliminate all ergonomic problems with dishwashers, but they are the best answer so far.

Oven

It's pretty clear that the folks who decided to put the oven below the range top never tried to lift a 30 lb turkey into or out of one.

Fortunately, with the advent of the microwave, the oven is not used as often as it was 40 years ago. But if someone in your household is a serious, make-everything-from-scratch cook or a fervent baker, a separate wall oven should be considered.

Ideally, the oven door should be waist-high, not hugging the floor. A single oven set so the bottom of the oven door is about 32-36" from the floor is the ideal arrangement. If you really need a double oven, then expect one or both ovens to be either too high or too low.

The trade-off, of course, is cost. You can expect a cooktop/wall oven combination to cost at least twice as much as a range with a built-in oven.

Refrigerator

The top freezer refrigerator was never an ergonomic success. It puts the most used part of the refrigerator down by the floor, where a lot of stooping and bending is required to use it.

The slight extra cost, however, is almost always justified in a refrigerator, which is the appliance used most often in a typical kitchen.

For more on cost vs. ergonomic benefits, see Kitchen Remodeling on the Cheap.

Microwave

The microwave has always been the red-headed stepchild of kitchen design. There is just no good place to put one.

Countertop models take up too much valuable countertop space. Under-cabinet units must be small to fit under wall cabinets, ending up too small to be fully useful.

Over-the-range (OTR) combination microwave-vent units are too high for safe use by all but the tallest—and who in their right mind ever thought that reaching over a pot of boiling spaghetti to retrieve a bowl of steaming spaghetti sauce from a microwave nearly over your head was a really smart idea?

The best solution so far is the under-counter pull-out drawer microwave. The appliance provides superb access by placing the microwave right at the most convenient height. It can even be installed under a cooktop.

It's not all roses, however.

The price is about double that of a premium countertop microwave but coming down quickly as more companies get into the drawer microwave business. Many models do not have turntables, an astounding omission. Plus, there is the cost of installation, including an additional electrical connection.

Ergonomic Wall Cabinets

Learn more about living without upper cabinets at Off the Wall Kitchens: Living Without Upper Cabinets.

Getting along without wall cabinets, however, means your remaining storage has to do double duty.

The big problem with upper cabinets is that they have doors. Doors are a nuisance to efficient kitchen work. They keep you from just reaching into the cabinet. You first have to step back to get out of the way, then open the door, then get the item, close the door, and return to your original position.

One solution is just to omit the doors, turning the upper cabinets into what are in effect open shelves. But doors do have a purpose. They hide all of the clutter and keep dust and grease from getting into the cabinet.

Perhaps the best doors from an ergonomic point of view are those that open upward. Up-swing doors are rare in this country; much more common in Europe and Asia. By swinging up, they are out of the way and can be left open for easy access until the task at hand is done.

Side-hinged doors—by far the most common door type and the only style available in most factory cabinet lines—with modern European-style hidden hinges cannot be left open because they stick straight out and are perfectly positioned to knock noggins and generally be in the way.

There are special invisible hinges available that allow the door to lie almost flat against the cabinet, but these are large, klutzy, and expensive.

Cost is once again the trade-off. Up-swing doors are almost always custom doors, and the elaborate hardware necessary to hold a lifted door securely in position is pricier than a couple of simple hinges.

Designing for Physical Disabilities

Kitchen ergonomics got a second big boost in the 1970s when the Americans With Disabilities Act forced engineers and designers to rethink basic design concepts in order to create workable spaces for persons with physical limitations, the most challenging of which is confinement to a wheelchair.

A wheelchair-friendly kitchen is inherently a sitting kitchen updated for the modern kitchen.

Design focuses on removing barriers through ergonomic layouts, roll-under workspaces, and lowered or motorized cabinetry. Modifications like pull-down pantry shelves, single-lever faucets, and side-opening ovens significantly enhance safety and independence.

Lowered Countertops …

Countertops need to be lowered to table height. A wheelchair's armrests are typically 27 to 20 inches from the floor, so the clearance under the countertop must be 28 to 31 inches. This requires a countertop height of between 30 and 33 inches.

ADA guidelines require a maximum height of 34 inches for fixed accessible work surfaces and sinks. But in many situations, this maximum is too high. Thirty-two inches is the practical minimum for required knee clearance and for most accessible appliances to fit.

A clear floor space of 30 by 48 inches is typically required in front of the counter, kept free of obstructions.

… And Sinks

The lowered countertop also includes the top that contains the kitchen sink.

Special sinks are usually required to preserve the clearance under the sink needed to accommodate a wheelchair.

These sinks are specifically engineered to offer barrier-free usage for wheelchair users. The primary design difference between an accessible sink and a standard model is a shallower basin depth (typically 5.5 to 6 inches deep compared to the standard 9 to 10 inches) paired with an open layout underneath to provide necessary knee and toe clearance.

The piping under the sink must be installed to maximize legroom. The drain trap must be concealed in the wall or offset to the rear, positioned as close to the wall as possible. Pipes must be shielded to prevent inadvertent impacts that may result in injury.

A minimum of 27" of vertical clearance from the floor is mandated by most plumbing codes; 28" is better. The clear space under the sink must also be at least 30" wide; 36" is better, allowing more freedom of movement.

Appliances

Many major appliances such as the standard cooking range with an integrated oven cannot be safely used by a person in a wheelchair.

Suitable appliances are highly ergonomic with modified height, front-facing controls, and mechanism designs that maximize reachability and simplify operation for ease of use and safety.

All major appliance manufacturers offer ADA-compliant appliances, as do specialized companies such as the Summit brand manufactured by Felix Storch, Inc., and ASKO , of Lidköping, Sweden.

Cooktops

Cooktops should have front-mounted controls and an open, roll-under knee clearance of 27" at a minimum.

If a lowered cooktop is built into standard-height countertops on one side, the other side must be lowered to provide a minimum of a 15" landing zone that is the same height as the cooktop. Eighteen to 24 inches is better if the space is available. (See The Thirty-One Kitchen Design Rules, Illustrated & Annotated, Rule 17.)

Building codes usually require that cooktops be vented to the outdoors at a minimum volume of 150 cubic feet of air per minute (cfm) just like normal-height cooktops. (See The Thirty-One Kitchen Design Rules, Illustrated & Annotated, Rule 19.)

Adjustable-height cooktops are available, operated by an electric motor. The idea is that the cooktop can be raised for a standing user and lowered for wheelchair access.

These are not necessary. A standing household member can comfortably use a lowered cooktop, and the cost savings—between $2,000 and $3,000—can be directed to other needs.

Refrigerator

The best upright refrigerator configuration for a wheelchair-accessible kitchen is a side-by-side model.

This style requires less door-swing clearance and places at least 60% of the storage, including fresh and frozen foods, within the ADA maximum reach range of 48 inches.

It is considerably less costly than a French door model with a bottom freezer drawer, which is the other configuration frequently recommended.

It is also easier to use. The freezer drawer, when loaded, is heavy and, while well-balanced, can be a chore to pull out and push in.

Roll-out shelves make it easier for people who use a wheelchair to access contents, and transparent shelves and storage bins let the user easily see what is inside the refrigerator.

Door handles are a consideration. Doors with pull handles are better than those with recessed handles.

Most impaired users can handle a manually opening door easily, but if a deterioration of manual ability is present or a possibility in the future, an auto-open refrigerator door is worth looking into.

These are models with sensors, motorized hinges, and a control pad to automatically break the door's airtight seal and swing it open by simply tapping the pad.

Ice makers avoid the nuisance of remembering to fill ice trays, but look for an ice maker that is not more than 48" from the floor to the tip of the panel and located on the outside of the freezer door.

Another option is an under-counter refrigerator and companion freezer designed for installation under a lowered countertop.

The refrigerator and freezer are separate units usually installed side-by-side. Generally available from restaurant suppliers, they do not have the capacity or all of the conveniences of the usual residential refrigerator, like a built-in ice maker or vegetable drawer, and they are about twice the cost.

Dishwasher

Most major appliance manufacturers make ADA-compliant dishwashers that are engineered with a lower 32-inch to 34-inch height profile to slide seamlessly beneath lower, wheelchair-accessible countertops.

According to ADA guidelines, compliant units must feature front-loading racks accessible from the front and control panels placed between 15 and 48 inches from the floor.

Furthermore, all buttons, dials, or touchpads must be easily operable with one hand using less than 5 pounds of force without the need for tight pinching, grasping, or wrist twisting.

Some compliant units will fit under our preferred 33" countertops, but most will not.

Drawer Dishwashers

These features make them exceptionally well-suited for individuals with limited mobility, back pain, or those in a wheelchair.

Most single-drawer models and specialized double-drawer units are officially ADA compliant when installed under a lowered countertop, providing a smooth pull-out mechanism, straightforward top-facing or front controls, and manageable loading zones.

Instead of stacking two drawers vertically, two separate single-drawer units can be installed on either side of the sink to provide full dishwasher capacity without the harder-to-reach lower drawer.

Dishwasher Sinks

Another option for small households is the dishwasher sink. This device is a double-basin sink in which one of the basins is actually a small electric dishwasher.

As far as we know, only the Chinese company, Ningbo Fotile Kitchen Ware Co., Ltd., sells them in North America. Here is what the manufacturer says about the product:

"FOTILE 3-IN-1 in-sink dishwasher is a convenient appliance combining a kitchen sink, a dishwasher, and a produce/seafood cleaner. It combines dishwashing, sanitization, and drying in one simple process. Sanitization and bacteria elimination through 5 washing cycles with temperatures of 140° to 167°.

The dishwasher sinks are sold at retailers like Wayfair and Home Depot for about $1,200.00, about three times the price of a good-quality stainless steel sink but cheaper than a separate sink and dishwasher.

The advantage of the device is that for a two- or three-person household, it is a convenient way to wash dishes without the bending, stoopng, and twisting involved in loading and unloading a standard floor-mounted dishwasher. Its disadvantage is that it is too small for most pots, pans, and serving pieces that would all need to be hand washed.

Ovens

Standard ovens are a problem of wheelchair users.

Traditional oven doors fold downward, acting as an obstruction. This design requires the user to lean forward and reach across a hot metal door to access the interior, significantly increasing the risk of burns.

Ovens placed under the counter require low bending and awkward angles. Safely lifting heavy casserole dishes or baking sheets becomes nearly impossible from a seated position.

Wall Ovens

The best oven for wheelchair users is probably a properly positioned wall oven, although with the massive improvement in countertop ovens in recent years (see below), this is no longer an absolute certainty.

Although called "wall ovens," they are usually mounted in tall cabinets with a storage drawer below for the cookware used in the oven.

Accessible wall ovens are designed to maximize independence by eliminating drop down oven doors in favor of side-swing doors that allow wheelchair users to pull up directly parallel to the oven to safely slide pans in and out with little risk.

f They are mounted at heights to fit the user. Accessible guidelines suggest mounting the over no higher than 34" above the finished floor. We have found that 27-30 inches is ideal for most users, high enough for knees to fit under the extended shelves but low enough for the user to easily retrieve hot foods from a sitting position without risk.

The control panel should be between 15 and 48 inches from the finished floor, with front-facing controls.

Slide-out racks that lock into place for safe removal of hot dishes are a must-have.

An increasing number of ovens can be controlled remotely through a smartphone, tablet, or home network. The user can fully adjust temperature, set cooking times, preheat, and monitor meals through an internal camera. When paired with smart assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, some wall ovens allow for completely hands-free, voice-activated cooking.

A wall oven must have a countertop landing area immediately adjacent to at least one side of the oven. (See The Thirty-One Kitchen Design Rules, Illustrated & Annotated, Rule 23.)

Countertop Ovens

If a wall oven is not a practical option, countertop ovens are available.

Many wheelchair users find countertop convection ovens, toaster ovens, or air fryers much easier and safer to operate.

The downside of existing models, however, is that they are relatively small and their capacity is limited, although their versatility is not.

The best premium multi-function combination ovens are more like enhanced mini versions of their full-size cousins, having evolved into all-in-one cooking centers far removed from their primitive toaster-oven ancestry.

Many integrate instant-on heating (eliminating the need to preheat), high-velocity convection fans, air frying, independent dual-zone cooking, and smart app integration that seamlessly connects via Wi-Fi to a smartphone application that controls all oven functions remotely.

Storage

Storage is an even bigger problem in accessible kitchens than it is in standard kitchens, requiring some serious out-of-the-box planning.

The major problem is that much of the space normally used for storage in a normal kitchen is conceded to under-counter knee clearance.

Knee clearance, at a minimum, is needed under the cooking station, the sink area, and one or more prep counters. All of this empty space is right where the most accessible storage could be located.

The deficit in lower cabinet storage cannot be made up using wall cabinets.

A seated user's reach ranges from 15" to 48" above the finished floor, so, at best, only the front half of the lowest shelf of a wall cabinet is even marginally useful as storage space. The rest is out of reach.

So, where do we put all the stuff?

The ADA accessibility rules require 50% of the total surface area or cabinet storage space to fall inside the 15" to 48" reach limitation.

Undercounter Storage

The need for adequate knee clearance removes as much as half of the storage space in lower cabinets from any consideration. In consequence, the remaining cabinets have to do extra duty.

Pullout Trays

The worst accessible solution is pullout trays hidden behind a door or door front.

These are available as independent trays or as a unit composed of trays attached to a door front. Closed, it looks like a door, but is not hinged, and pulls out like a drawer, dragging the trays with it.

Independent Trays

To access an independent tray, five discrete steps are required.

The user needs to first open the door, extend the tray, remove the item being sought, close the tray, and, finally, close the door.

The door has no function except to hide the trays behind a decorative facade. It could just as well be a curtain. It does not contribute to and, in fact, impairs efficiency.

Modern "invisible" door hinges do not allow doors to open 180° to lie flat against the cabinet. They park at about 95°, almost perpendicular to the cabinets. The open door means that a tray is not accessible from the door side. The door is in the way.

Grouped Trays

In some units, trays are attached to what looks like a door but is actually a "door front." The door front and attached trays all pull out at the same time. Sometimes the individual trays are adjustable up and down for storage flexibility (at an additional cost, of course), but most of the time they are not.

You are stuck with the tray spacing set by the manufacturer.

Only the top tray is fully accessible.

To put anything in or take anything out of the lower trays, it has to be maneuvered in or out from the side. This may not sound like much of a nuisance until you have actually tried it; then its want of convenience will become abundantly clear.

Drawers

The solution is, of course, not trays, but drawers.

A drawer is nothing more than a pullout tray with a decorative front called, with no imagination whatsoever, a "drawer front."

Pull out the drawer front, and the drawer comes with it. So, unlike decorative door fronts, drawer fronts do not require extra steps to access contents and don't impede the process.

Just three steps are required: open the drawer, remove or replace the item, close the drawer.

Since each drawer can be opened independently, no drawer's access is hindered by a drawer above. If a drawer gets in the way, just close it.

The only doors that should be seen on lower cabinets in an accessible kitchen are (1) the door that hides the pullout trash and recycling bins and (2) the door that conceals the swing-up stand mixer (if one is installed). Everything else should be drawers.

Wall Cabinet Storage

With a 34" countertop and wall cabinets placed at the accessibility-recommended 14" above the countertop, a wall cabinet's bottom shelf is about 50" above the finished floor, or above the highest recommended reach, 48 inches.

The only solution to this problem is to make the wall cabinets reachable by lowering them, and mechanisms exist to do just that.

Some are manual. The user pulls on a handle to lower the shelves inside the cabinet, not the cabinet itself, and pushes the shelves back to their resting position once the desired items have been removed or replaced.

These devices assume that the user has enough manual and upper-body strength to perform the operations needed.

Motorized lifts operate by pushing a button.

Manual lifts are considerably less expensive than motorized lifts, but not nearly as convenient.

In either case, the lift lowers the cabinet contents 14 inches to the countertop, giving the user access to the bottom and second shelf of the wall cabinet, but not usually the top shelf of the common 30-inch-tall wall cabinet.

The shelving in these units is a part of the lift, not of the cabinet. Cabinets are just shells, made with open bottoms and without shelves. Some manufacturers close the front of the cabinet with a non-opening door panel. However, we recommend a hinged door in case something gets stuck and access into the cabinet is needed to fix the problem. Additionally, access to contents through the door is handy for household members who are not chairbound.

Even More Ergonomics—What We Can Learn from Studying a Commercial Kitchen

One excellent source of the techniques that work to adapt your home kitchen to your specific needs are studies of what works in commercial kitchens.

In a commercial kitchen where a lot of appetizing, attractive, and savory meals have to be prepared and assembled quickly and efficiently, everything must not only be ready but within easy reach of the chef.

A busy chef does not do much walking. Every­thing he needs is within his or her immediate reach while standing in place—movement is minimized, efficiency and speed optimized… (Continues).

Rev. 06/08/26