Great Kitchens: At Home With America's Top Chefs

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Summary: Great ideas and outstanding design in a beautiful book!
Review: Because we're planning to remodel the kitchen, I've looked at many kitchen design books. This is the best one! It has great ideas. It has floor plans. The featured chefs even talk about the mistakes they think they made when they designed their kitchens. These are grand kitchens. Even if you want to do something more modest, you'll appreciate the ideas in this book. We've all cooked in kitchens that are just plain badly designed. These kitchens were planned by people who really cook. If you don't have a kitchen remodel in your future, put this book on your coffee table. Everyone will enjoy looking at it.

Rating:
Summary: The best kitchen design book...
Review: Because we're planning to remodel the kitchen, I've looked at many kitchen design books. This is the best one! It has great ideas. It has floor plans. The featured chefs even talk about the mistakes they think they made when they designed their kitchens. These are grand kitchens. Even if you want to do something more modest, you'll appreciate the ideas in this book. We've all cooked in kitchens that are just plain badly designed. These kitchens were planned by people who really cook. If you don't have a kitchen remodel in your future, put this book on your coffee table. Everyone will enjoy looking at it.

Rating:
Summary: Full of brilliant ideas that are actually useful!
Review: Finally a book with some "meat and potatoes" content that is enhanced with beautiful photography and actual floorplans! Not just a book of pretty pictures that have little to do with actual cooking. These kitchens combine the best of design, performance and above all, personality. The written background is also fascinating and really gets into these chef's heads about their approaches to their own, personal kitchens. When's Book TWO?!!!

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Summary: Absolutely the best book ever for planning a kitchen.
Review: I bought this book thinking that it would be just a sort of celebrity tour of the home kitchens of some well-known chefs, a great idea in itself, but more style than substance. Boy was I wrong. There's more meat to this book than in Julia Child's beef bourguignon. My wife and I have been planning to completely overhaul our kitchen for years now, and we've gone through dozens of kitchen books without finding much really useful design information. Well here it is. On our first sitting with Great Kitchens, we identified at least five great kitchen design ideas we will definitely incorporate into our new kitchen. I'm sure there are more, but I just can't seem to get the book out of my wife's hands.

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Summary: How great cooks design their own kitchens
Review: I ordered two Kitchen Books. Great Kitchens: Design Ideas from Top Chefs AND Great Kitchens: At Home with Top American Chefs. GUESS WHAT? Same book. That is why I gave it a low rating. I feel I was Dooped. Of course, I sent the book right back but why change the cover photo and title? I could find nowhere that is said they are the same book. I did not need the aggrevation so beware.

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Summary: A great "Go By" book on Kitchens, but watch for pot holes!
Review: I really like this book alot!
Ken Hom's kitchen fascinated me. The 90 second Hobart sanitizing machine is De Rigueuer but you still have to wash all your dishes before you put them in the Hobart.

Secondly, study his work triangles and read the text. There were sink plumbing restrictions during remodeling and design focus on teaching. Su cuccina, mi cuccina? Maybe not but a great collection of design ideas, just look closely. See waht ideas would work for you and why. Some of these kitchens (John Folse)were designed for TV Production with ample room to move cameras around.

These chefs will tell you some of the mistakes they made and give you the reasons why they designed their kitchens the way they did. A great read and a great drool! Kitchen Kudos to you Miss Ellen Whitaker, et al!

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Summary: For cooks who are remodeling
Review: My husband and I both love to cook and we're looking at remodeling our kitchen. This book has great inspiration on how to think about your kitchen space and how you use it. It's got some great ideas on how to think about your kitchen arrangement and storage options from people who KNOW what can get irritating very quickly. The downside of this book is that these kitchens were obviously done on budgets that most of us would never dream of -- we're not going to be installing professional/commercial grade appliances, and we're not going to have granite countertops or custom-made cabinetry. However, just to read how professional chefs planned out their own kitchens to make their lives easier, and their ideas on storage and display make this book well worth while.

Rating:
Summary: Drool
Review: Never have I agreed more with an editorial Amazon review than when this one warned the envy-prone against buying this book. I want this stuff! (Particularly the industrial-grade wok and 90-second dishwasher.) If the subject at all interests you, you will not be disappointed in this book. The production values are excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Kitchen Planning Book
Review: This is hands-down the best kitchen planning and design book I have seen. I learned so many things from it about picking materials, lighting, fixtures, sinks, layouts, etc. that my remodeled kitchen will be better because of it. I paged through endless books and magazines filled with lovely photos, but that lacked information or substance. This book stands out because it discusses pros and cons, budget tradeoffs made, the good decisions and "if-I-had-it-to-do-over-again" mistakes. These are kitchens put together by demanding professionals who won't tolerate (bad)or lightweight materials that are hard to clean. I learned many lessons about flooring, countertops, backsplashes and so on that were never touched upon by other books. Sure there are appliances to drool over, but there are also chefs who ran out of money during the remodel, or bought factory seconds tile to save money. Real-life issues and lessons.

Rating:
Summary: I'm swimming upstream on this one
Review: To be perfectly honest with you, I was a little disappointed in the book. I expected to see kitchens that I could only dream of. Instead I saw utilitarian efforts by America's top chefs. Imagine looking into Mario Andretti's personal garage. Would it look like a dream shop, or more like a GM assembly plant? One kitchen in this book had tall, bare cinderblock walls, that were not even finished, right in the center of the kitchen. How do you prevent dust from accumulating in bare cinderblock, and inadvertently arriving in some of the food? Their were some kitchens that were nicer than that, but nothing that inspired me.
Personally, I am interested in a kitchen that is as beautiful as it is practical. I found, the book, Kitchen's That Work, A Practical Guide to Creating a Great Kitchen, a much more informative, and inspiring book, no matter what your budget.
If you want to throw your pinky in the air, and poo paa your neighbors, then leave Great Kitchens on your coffee table. Their is plenty of names to drop in there. But if you want to create a great-dream kitchen, then get Kitchen's that Work. From soup to nuts, that is the book to have for the practical to the particular.
In all fairness, I am not sorry I bought Great Kitchens, as I am sure I can glean information from it. If you would like to hear about some of the considerations the top chefs like to see in their kitchens, then by all means buy the book. I guess I was expecting something awe inspiring, and that is not what this book is. I gave it four stars, because I never met a man, I couldn't learn something from.