Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Check out the buff stuff for the 21st century kitchen and bath, from sleeker refrigerators to ovens that do more, faster. The rest of the house gets the treatment, too.
By JUDY STARK
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 19, 2000
ORLANDO -- Ladies and gentlemen, step over here and look at the refrigerator.
The commercials have started appearing on TV: The icemaker is now in the door, not at the top of the freezing compartment. Kitchen Aid, Whirlpool and Kenmore are among the early vendors of these models. The advantages: It frees up room in the freezer (Kitchen Aid claims a space increase of 19 percent). It also allows homeowners to lift the ice bin off the door and carry it easily to where ice is needed. These new refrigerators were among the stars of the show at the recent Southeast Building Conference in Orlando. Builders, developers, designers, architects and others who work in residential construction in 10 southeastern states gather every summer for seminars, socializing and a look at what's new in building products.
Kitchen Aid's 25.5-cubic-foot refrigerator with ice-in-the-door technology is $2,100 in cobalt blue, a color you also can select for a dishwasher panel. Other colors (bright red and yellow) are on the way.
Kenmore is showing a refrigerator in stainless steel and graphite (dark gray) in its Elite line, a look that's very uptown urban loft. To take the "suite" look of appliances one step further -- this time out on the deck -- Kenmore and GE Monogram are both introducing an outdoor grill that matches their indoor appliance lines.
It's worth noting that these are the two dominant appliance manufacturers in the new-home market. It's one more appliance to offer with the house (wrap it into the mortgage!), or one more upgrade to offer, or one more buyer incentive: a free matching grill if you buy the house. Seventy-five percent of American homes have grills. No wonder this looks like a great new sales opportunity to the manufacturers who are selling the range/microwave/refrigerator package.
Don't neglect the sink as we rethink the kitchen. Everybody's in love with that professional look of stainless steel, and everybody's in love with "apron" or "farm" sinks, those deep sinks with the exposed fronts. Franke Consumer Products, manufacturer of high-end kitchen sinks, marries the two with a sleek stainless farm sink. This will list for $2,000; you'll pay less.
A few aisles away, Allante International of Wilmington, N.C., was displaying a farmhouse sink carved from a solid block of marble quarried in Spain. Glorious to the touch and gorgeous to look at (and nothing so beautiful ever appeared in any farmhouse we know), this lists at $2,200.
Elsewhere on the trade show floor, a lot of tough, gritty scientific research was underway. It involved pizza, chicken wings, sweet rolls and chocolate chip cookies. LOTS of chocolate chip cookies.
That menu of the major snack food groups is what the vendors of fast-cooking ovens were preparing and serving and handing out to all comers. These new ovens have been working their way into the marketplace for the past six months. You'll start to see print ads and TV commercials, and appliance stores are already offering cooking classes to introduce consumers to these new time-saving devices.
These fast-cook ovens promise to prepare food in a small fraction of the time required by conventional ovens, and to do what microwaves cannot: cook food brown and crispy.
So the guys at the Jenn-Air booth were preparing frozen pizzas in 51/2 minutes with their Accellis 5XP wall oven. (By the time the show was half over, they were sufficiently sick of scarfing up the leftovers that they never wanted to see a pizza again.) The Jenn-Air model claims to cook up to five times faster than conventional cooking.
"You can do gourmet cooking but not spend all day doing it," said spokesman Russ Caswell as he slid a frozen pizza into the oven and punched a few buttons. This wall oven, with a retail price of $3,500, will be available in September.
Maytag, Jenn-Air's sister company, will introduce its Accellis 2X range this month for $1,399. This offers conventional oven functions plus rapid-cook options that prepare food in half the time.
Since most major appliance manufacturers have jumped on this quick-cook bandwagon, there's a lot of "Mine is better than the other guy's." Most of these ovens come already programmed to cook popular foods. Or you can punch in the time and temperature at which you routinely cook something and the oven will adjust accordingly. There are wall ovens and free-standing ranges, very expensive top-of-the-line versions and slightly less expensive second lines. Manufacturers have produced cookbooks to increase consumers' comfort level, and some offer demonstrations and cooking classes at appliance stores to teach consumers how to use these appliances.
The ovens use a variety of technologies: halogen lighting, microwaves, forced hot air, quartz heat, radiant heat, convection cooking.
Marianne E. Langan, a onetime magazine food editor and now a demonstration cook in Miami, had just finished cooking chicken wings in a prototype of the Whirlpool Accubake oven. This will be priced at $2,300 in stainless, slightly less in biscuit, when it reaches the market in November.
The Accubake uses a combination of microwave, convection and radiant heat powered by a quartz element. "You can hear the crunch" when you bite into foods, she said, as she prepared a tray of chocolate cookies for Accubaking.
The Accubake comes as a unit: the fast-cook oven and a full convection/conventional oven.
Questions worth asking if you're considering buying any of these: How long is the warranty? What sort of maintenance must I perform, and how often? Do I need to clean a bulb or heating element after every use? When an element needs replacing, is that a do-it-yourself task or a service call? How fast and how well does this oven cook foods I routinely prepare for dinner? Pizza and cookies are fine for handouts at a trade show, but how will this oven prepare meat loaf, baked potatoes, chicken, lasagna, or whatever else you have no time to cook now? Is this oven big enough to cook a turkey or a big ham? Can I use my regular cookware or do I need special plates? What else will this oven do? Can I use just the microwave capacity if I just want to make popcorn or reheat coffee? Can I use the convection-cooking component alone?
"Twenty-five percent of homes have have whirlpool tubs. Ten percent of them use 'em," Ron Jennings of Moen Plumbing was saying as he pointed out his company's Asceri vertical spa.
This is a shower that will spray, massage, pummel and pound you from various angles at various temperatures and water volumes with overhead, body and hand-held sprays. Whereas taking a bath is a time-consuming production, a shower can be a routine daily pleasure.
Moen also showed faucets in nickel and black matte -- again, that loft look -- as well as gold with seaspray green and gold with "pebble cream," a sparkly biscuit color.
New from Sustainable Energy Systems in Sarasota were photovoltaic roofing modules -- in other words, roofing that generates solar heat. They install alongside standard shingles or metal roofing and are virtually indistinguishable in appearance, eliminating the look of solar panels that many homeowners find unattractive. They can be installed with the same tools and methods as standard roofing installation, the company says, as well as providing the same level of protection as premium roofing. The roofing shingles are made of "amorphous silicon" and are about 7 feet long and 12 inches deep. The metal roofing is a prebonded strip. Spokeswoman Cynthia Conway estimated $17,000-$20,000 for enough roofing "to take care of a good, substantial portion of the load for a 2,000-square-foot house that was relatively energy-efficient in terms of design and efficient appliances." Likely a homeowner would still need an outside power source, depending on time of year, number of occupants in the home, and energy demand.
These won the Popular Science Grand Award in its "Best of What's New (Environmental Technology)" category, and Discover magazine's Technological Innovation Award for "Best Innovation/Environment." Visit their Web site at http://www.sespv.com, or call (941) 362-3129.