Kitchenette

A kitchenette is a small cooking area.

In some motel and hotel rooms, small apartments, college dormitories, or office buildings, a kitchenette usually consists of a small refrigerator, a microwave oven or hotplate, and, less frequently, a sink. New York City building code defines a kitchenette as a kitchen of less than 7.4 m² (80 ft²) of floor space.^[1]

Example of kitchenette located in a small studio apartment of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.

Kitchenettes are a common feature in hotel and motel guest rooms and often contain a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, and small countertop, commonly called a mini-bar. Some hotel kitchenettes have provisioned refrigerators that have an interior movement sensor feature used by management to monitor guest use of the refrigerator's contents and thus charge for the consumables. This feature can be a point of contention because a guest may want to review the product before consuming it or to see what else there may be inside but that movement is enough to trigger the sensor and thus be charged.

In British English, the term kitchenette also refers to a small secondary kitchen in a house. Often it is found on the same floor as the children's bedrooms, and used by a nanny or au pair to prepare meals for children; the same feature can be found in hotels such as some in London.

The word kitchenette was also used to refer to a type of small apartment prevalent in African American communities in Chicago and New York City during the mid-twentieth century. Landlords often divided single-family homes or large apartment units into smaller units to house more families. Living conditions in these kitchenettes were often wretched; the author Richard Wright described them as "our prison, our death sentence without a trial".^[2]

In Brazil, a kitchenette (spelled "quitinete" in Brazilian Portuguese) is a very small apartment. It is basically composed of one room, one bathroom, and a kitchen, which is often in the same space as the room. It corresponds to the studio apartment in American culture (or studio flat in UK).

References

1. Department of Buildings. "Interior Environment" (PDF). New York City. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
2. Jerry Washington Ward and Robert Butler. "Kitchenettes". The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2008. 220.

External links

• Kitchenettes entry at the Encyclopedia of Chicago