Bigger Kitchen Doesn't Mean Better Kitchen — And Nobody In the Room Will Tell You That

The bigger the kitchen, the better. That's the assumption. Jon Beresford disagrees — and he has a very specific reason why. In this episode, Jon and Shannon break down why massive luxury kitchens are often the most poorly designed spaces in any home, and why almost nobody involved in building them has any financial reason to tell the homeowner to pump the brakes. The case starts with constraint. Smaller kitchens force trade-offs. Trade-offs force clarity. Clarity is what separates a kitchen that functions brilliantly from one that just looks expensive in the photograph. Big kitchens remove all of that pressure — and what fills the void is accumulation. More appliances, more zones, more everything, designed around an imagined version of how the family plans to live rather than how they actually do. Jon walks through what that looks like in practice: oversize ranges, refrigeration walls for couples who barely stock milk, secondary dishwashers that run a few times a year, steam ovens nobody learned to use, warming drawers storing cookie sheets. None of those products are the problem. The problem is that nobody in the design chain — not the designer, not the builder, not the salesperson — is rewarded for saying "do you actually need this?" The only person who pays that long-term cost is the homeowner. And they're almost always the least informed person in the room during the design phase. Jon also gets into the trap salespeople fall into on large projects — the moment they accept the customer's pre-built vision and become a coordinator instead of an advisor — and what the best salespeople do instead. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.