The Quiet Return of the Pantry

One Tuesday morning in February, in a Victorian terrace in Holland Park, a woman called Olivia made a cup of tea. The kettle was not on a worktop. The teabags were not in a drawer. The mugs were not hanging beneath a shelf. None of those things were anywhere visible. The kettle, the teabags and the mugs, together with the toaster, the dog''s bowl, three children''s school-bags and a rather aggressive coffee machine, were all on the other side of a door that, from the kitchen, looked exactly like a piece of cabinetry.

The door was about 1.8 metres tall, painted a colour the decorator''s plan called rained-on plaster, and had no handle. Olivia opened it with a brass cup-pull recessed into a rebate so neat you would miss it unless someone showed you. Behind the door was a room. A working, humming, lit-from-within room with a small sink, a second oven, a counter and the kind of order you do not get when life is required to photograph well.

On her way back to the island with the tea, Olivia said the line that finished this essay for me before it had begun. The pantry, she said, swinging the door shut behind her with a hip, is the best room in the house.

The open-plan kitchen, that great, sociable, light-flooded engine of the late-20th-century home, is, quietly, on its way out. Not everywhere. Not yet. But in the houses being briefed in 2026, the brief has shifted. The scullery, that Edwardian back-kitchen our grandmothers'' housekeepers ran, has been redrawn and renamed, and is being installed in postcodes that have not seen one since 1928.

Some of this is fashion. Most of it is fatigue. Twenty years of knock-throughs, marble-topped islands and statement extractor hoods have taught a generation of homeowners something the Victorians knew instinctively: you do not actually want to live in the room where the washing-up happens. You want to look at that room. Or, better, you want to look at the door of that room. From a sofa. With a glass of something cold.

Twenty years of knock-throughs have taught a generation of homeowners what the Victorians knew instinctively: you do not want to live in the room where the washing-up happens.

The numbers are not subtle. Houzz UK''s 2025 kitchen report finds 41% of bespoke kitchen projects briefed in the last twelve months included a back-kitchen, pantry or scullery, up from 19% in 2021. RIBA''s design intelligence calls it the single clearest signal of the post-pandemic British house: the kitchen, having spent two decades dissolving into the living room, is rebuilding its walls.

Pantries are not a category; they are a posture. The 4.2-square-metre version in Holland Park, the 11-square-metre version in Wilmslow and the rather grand walk-around at the Cotswolds barn solved different problems for different lives. The rule, where I could find one, is this: the smaller the kitchen, the harder the pantry has to work; the bigger the kitchen, the more discreet the pantry can be.

Holland Park · 4.2 m² · the hidden one

The smallest of the three is the most ambitious. The clients did not want a pantry visible from the kitchen; they wanted it indistinguishable from the kitchen. The solution was a single full-height door, set inside an unbroken run of in-frame cabinetry. Inside: a 1.8 m worktop, a Belfast sink half the size of the kitchen''s, a single Wolf combination-oven and the entire breakfast liturgy on one shelf. Sunday lunch goes in dirty; Sunday afternoon the kitchen still looks photographic.

Wilmslow · 11 m² · the lived-in one

Here the pantry is bigger than the front kitchen of most London flats. It has a window onto the side garden, an oak peninsula with two stools, and is, frankly, where the family actually lives. The photographic kitchen behind it is used four times a year. The Cheshire clients are entirely candid about this. The front kitchen is for the dinner parties, said the wife, in front of her husband, who nodded.

( 07: The designers respond )

Three voices on the room nobody sees.

Voice 01 / 3

Olivia Marwood · Senior Designer, Posh Design

“We design pantries differently to kitchens. A kitchen wants to be looked at; a pantry wants to be lived in. The lighting brief alone is a different document.

The open-plan kitchen was a 1990s answer to a 1970s problem. We wanted the cook to be part of the party. We wanted the children to be seen. We wanted the light. The trade, fitters, joiners, the people who actually have to live with the consequences, were never quite as convinced. The job we get asked to do most often, said a Cheshire joiner I spoke to, sanding the edge of a 6.8 m island in his workshop, is putting back the wall the architect knocked through.

What is happening now is not a retreat. It is, if anything, a more ambitious version of the open-plan idea: a house in which the photogenic kitchen and the working kitchen are both generous, both well-lit, both designed, but only one of them is on show. Olivia''s pantry door, closed, leaves her kitchen looking exactly the way the magazine photograph wanted it to look. Opened, it gives her a room she is not embarrassed by at 7.15 a.m.

Which is, in the end, all the brief ever was. A house in which we can be both photographic and human. A door, properly closed. A kettle, somewhere else.