Sink Design
Friday, June 19, 2009 at 11:08AM Kitchens and bathrooms:
Used regularly by almost everyone. Often shared and swapped, leading to broadly-experienced users. Long update iteration times. Great insight has been drawn from them. Great designers started their careers designing things for them. Time for me to add my 2c.
All the houses I've lived in have an inch or so of bench-top between the kitchen sink and the wall behind it. The space has always been part of the bench-top, often melamine covered chipboard, which is damaged if water seeps into it. This section is in a prime position to get wet, is hard to clean and isn't big enough for storage. I've usually stood my chopping board there, but it's not really the right place for it, with it occasional slipping and breaking of a wine glass etc.
Why is the gap there?
Best guess, is it's an engineering compromise to fit the sink in. Second guess, it's aesthetically pleasing for the sink 'island' to be surrounded by bench-top. Third guess is that it's a usability factor like providing space for the tap to rotate over to clear the general sink area.
Can anyone help explain?
Reader Comments (16)
The sink needs to sit on something, so while it would be possible to build a bracket that it could sit flush with the wall, it would cost more and take longer.
Also probably has something to do with the fact that kitchens are generally designed by and built by men who don't spend much time in the kitchen.
Good call.. Plenty of "professional" kitchen sinks have a built-in splash back area. I'd love something like that for the home though.
The gap is useful, to me, because you can sit stuff there, but it's definitely a "wet" area, so it'd be nice if it was part of the sink material.
Anyone know of consumer sinks which do this?
Truly you are a philosopher of the quotidian.
The problem is a lack of systems thinking: the sink designer thinks they're only responsible for the sink, not for the wider kitchen experience - so they build a great sink but don't consider its context.
Kitchen and bathroom equipment is designed to drop into holes in the benchtop. The sink can't be flush with the back wall, or it would have nothing to sit on. An integrated vertical splashback is definitely possible: commercial steel kitchen sinks are often constructed thus. See e.g. the admirably clearly-named http://www.stainlesssteelwashhandbasin.co.uk/
I think Rob's cracked it. I hear that's also why women's dress shoes are generally so painful to wear.
I have to say the bigger gripe for me is why do people ever get those rectangular ceramic sinks???? Sharp corners that are impossible to wipe down and made of a substance that is likely to break most things that you typically put into it.
It's probably up there with concrete floors in homes and ceilings that are double-height: aesthetic perhaps but completely impractical and uncomfortable.
Thank you all for the comments
@ Jessica More women in design, I say!
@Michael Honey — I had to look up 'quotidian'. Those basins you linked to sure are, um, industrial looking
@uxRob @Jaymis— Paretos principles would say that it's worth getting the kitchen sink right, even to the detriment of some other area of the kitchen. Corner folding cupboard doors, use quite a complex, adjustable mechanism to fit. If we can get a man on the moon, surely we can support a sink without an edge, and make sure it's designed from scratch to be a 'wet area' :-)
At school in England in the 80's, my proto-industrial-design class ("Technical Drawing") was *boys only*. The girls, meanwhile, were doing Home Economics, which is to say "Being a Housewife". So a preponderance of males in industrial design has, at least in the past, been structurally encouraged. That said, I found that the the single-sex classroom provided a welcome respite from my own raging hormones and I spent much more time studying that flirting in that class, got 100% in the exam, and was a happy boy.
Mass production of stock components, it's cheap and easy to do this way. The cabinet is a stock size which can be cut for an odd size if needed. The hole in it for the sink is a stock size for a variety of stock sinks with different lips/layouts/finishes. There is enough space for a variety of back-splashes.
If you don't want the gap, you can get a custom concrete/glass/stone/whatever sink shaped exactly how you want it. For a price of course :)
This is a pretty funny post/reply thread. I'm an objective-c programmer and interface designer. But used to build cabinets while I was learning to program in my spare time.
The sink is off the wall because it's cut in by hand with a jig saw, which has a several inch wide plate and a large body. The counter top, sink and cabinet configuration are generally not pre-fab, cookie-cutter designs, even in cookie-cutter houses. One guy puts in the cabinets, and only knows which cabinet to not build a drawer into leaving space for the sink; another guy puts in the counter top and maybe cuts a spot for the sink but usually just leaves it for the plumber. Counter top cats will lay the sink themselves if they're working with stone.
Either way, the hole for the sink is rarely pre-cut in the factory, which would be the only way to have it meet the back edge (easily).
And jigsaws rock.
@ Joe hehe — thanks for coming in and clarifying from a position of experience!
So it's the tools and specialized, sequential construction which is dictating what's possible (for the price).
A big reduction in time and cost of manufacture in exchange for a design slightly askew to intuition.
Reminiscent of one of my favourite
limericksrhymes: (thanks hywel!)I eat peas with honey
I've done it all my life
It makes them taste rather funny
But it keeps them on the knife.
I certainly do have an appreciation for jigsaws. Although this is not a jigsaw, it shows how flexible these tools are:
Interesting. I think this is a problem that can be solved. Just need a template that includes the rear edge of the worktop. The cutout will be pretty much the same, with a lip at the back, but the template guarantees that an integrated splashback sits flush to the wall.
Haiku…
Pedants may point out
Structurally, Keith,
That was not a Limerick.
If the sink is the type that rests on the countertop, the lip at the back of the countertop can be narrow enough so that there is no gap. That's how it was when we bought our house:
http://steveandmimi.com/uiandus/before.jpg
It was functional in this kitchen because the cabinets on that wall weren't the standard 24 inches deep. But if they were, the front of the sink would have been fairly far from the front of the countertop. These cabinets were custom made (albeit poorly) for this kitchen.
We remodeled before we moved in and took an entirely different approach to the space behind the sink:
http://steveandmimi.com/uiandus/after.jpg
Brilliant!
One more consideration - the closer the sink sits to the backsplash the less space, underneath the counter, there is to get tooling between the sink and the back of the cabinet in order to attach the water supply lines. There are fancy wrenches to help alleviate this problem, however they were created to solve the existing space issue. Take away even more of that gap, and it would be very difficult to get any clearance for your hands to turn the wrench. Take a look under there sometime, you'll see what I'm talking about.
@Shane -- thanks for that - yes lots of stuff 'under the hood'.
However, I don't think the tap should be mounted further back, just extend the sink.
For that matter - I really don't like the bit of bench at the front of the sink, and would much prefer the sink to come right to the edge.
I've not done any research, but would think something like this:
In this case I guess that gap was necessary to make it neat.
nice post. thanks.