If only.
Tell you wot: you give back Scania to the Danes, and Gud will do the rest.
I sooo much agree with the opening post for this topic! My gf’s kitchen is so small that of course the fridge is in the living room… :neutral: … at her parent’s place ( 3 bedroom 1 huge living room etc.) the kitchen is more western-like as it is a somehow small corner “open” to the living room but again, the huge fridge is like a big piece of furniture between the too spaces exposed (wtf?).
I am looking to i find a place for myself and i rejected places (just a studio or 1 bedroom place) just because the fridge was next to the couch almost inside what is supposed to be the “living room” area (i have lived in other houses of similar size in Europe where the spaces were well defined even small and the fridge was always INSIDE the kitchen).
By the way, as i have been told, one reason kitchens here are not big is because locals find it faster and cheaper to eat from street vendors… before i move in with my gf her fridge was just for decoration and the kitchen not used (only the microwave…)… we even had to buy some extra plates and basic equipment when i came. I come from a southern European country and food for us is quite important and we do value fresh ingredients and home-made food… … and damn! Jason’s and Matsusei markets are pricy!
I got a spare room if you’re a good cook 
And yes, some groceries are very expensive here, I’d suggest getting a Costco membership as you’ll save a lot of money on certain things that way. Also check out CitySuper, they have a pretty decent delicatessen, at least for Taiwan.
Not bragging here, but my last place in taipei had a fridge in the kitchen (four burner stove, Smegma oven, etc) PLUS a monster fridge in the lounge/dining room. Excellent for the bar. It is possible, but you generally need to redecorate and remodel to get a decent kitchen.
[quote=“Gao Bohan”]I think Okami and the chief (yes, his name gets bolded, always) have collectively hit the nail on the head. Chinese cuisine does not really require big ovens and four burner stoves. And since most people just buy whatever they need from the market for a day or two, big refrigerators (and the accompanying utility bills) are not needed. So…
- No need for big ovens. +
- No need for multi-top stoves. +
- No need for big refrigerators. +
- Limited housing space to begin with
=
Small kitchens in Taiwan. Does that about sum it up?[/quote]
Actually Taiwanese that live in the countryside can and do have big kitchens with HUGE multiple burners for stir frying (very cool in my opinion), but obviously they are not fitted out Western style. You want to live in the city…suck it up dudes or pay big moolah.
I know a place with a decent (by local standards) kitchen in Banqiao. Reasonable rent. Interested?
Ehem, talkking about kitchen setups, from my latest Mandarin edition of Beautiful Home -piao lian de gia- it seems local designers are getting warmed up to teh idea of kitchen “islands”. That is, you have the normal setup, right, against the wall, and then you add this separate structure in an open concept space.
Seems to me a very confortable compromise. You can add a small “breakfast” table -as we call it in Spanish- and voila, you have enough working space plus storage and counter space is not compromised.
Of course then you still need 1. space 2. your own place or a very flexible lanmdlord to add this structure. I think it will be more useful than a bar counter or whatever other horrible things I’ve seen before. Plus it’s fashionable right now.
Unfortunately, such fashionable things will likely only be available in newer, upscale places, which are more likely to be for sale than for rent. :s
Not really. I’ve seen quite some of the older gongwu -the ones I like- that have the open setup for this.
New places may not have enough space, actually.
And here I mistakenly thought the island was meant to be for the sinks and prep… 
Open space kitchens are great, if done right. My dad built a house back home and it had a really great open space kitchen. It also had a “breakfast bar” except that was never used once for eating at, since my dad decided to pile up all his mail and what not there, as it was just next to the kitchen table… good idea though, right? 
Here’s our kitchen:
What I like about it most is how it came about. The European kitchen set (dishwasher, oven, electric, gas and bbq stove top, extractor fan, drawers and benchtop) is ex-shop display, $48,000. It was a perfect fit for the space left after we got the fridge ($5,000 second hand). The island is an old executive desk (from the Taipei recyling place) that we turned into a sink/storage/workspace. The double sink is Italian. All the other colors were 10,000, the brown one 1,600 on clearance as “nobody” liked them. The tiles were sent to us a by a company. We asked for a few samples to choose from and they sent us enough to do the kitchen-top. My husband did all the work himself. It’s not a huge space but there is enough counterspace for us to work with.
Fabulous, open, and airy! I love it!
Asiababy,
You have a nice kitchen for a small space. Looks like you made good with the room you had and made it work. Hats off to you. 
Asiababy, I loathe you, you got a dishwasher :raspberry:
So not fair and they’re so damn expensive here…
Nice kitchen though 
Traditional square courtyard houses were designed kitchen first, which was the focal point of the extended families which lived in them, connecting the living spaces and forming the entrance from the courtyard. I guess when China urbanized, and people had to have small flats, the socialising moved out to restaurants. In Malaysia, I have seen extended (Chinese) families living together in homes with huge kitchens where the kitchen is a focal point of the house. I guess Chinese people would prefer to entertain at home if they had the space. Perhaps, though, like in the West, people have forgotten how to cook. The proliferation of cooking programmes on TV, the adverts for bizarre utensils on shopping channels, and the fact that there are more and more bad restaurants in Taipei leads me to this conclusion. It used to be almost impossible to have a bad meal in Taipei. Now it’s hard to find edible niu rou mian, and where have all my favourite lu rou fan joints gone? Many of my favourite Wai Sheng restaurants have moved to China. Shabu shabu? Frozen garbage boiled in dishwater. Deep-fried everything?
One thing that really gets me though is that no matter how small and poorly equipped a kitchen here is, it must by law have an electric dish drying apparatus.
The emptiness of kitchens here may also have something to do with the lack of electricity. It appears to me that most houses I have seen here were built when electricity was still a novelty, and therefore upgrading them to include “all mod cons” requires you to find an electrician. Which as anybody who has ever looked for one here knows, is nigh on impossible. It is, in fact, easier to move into a brand new apartment than to upgrade an old kitchen. Plus, the brand new apartment will probably have a really cool dish drying box in the kitchen.
A dish dryer is there by law? Oh man, where to start…
Lovely kitchen, asiababy! 
A friend of a friend lives in a four-story townhouse in a gated community in Xizhi, a community adjacent to Lotus Hill.
His kitchen is huge. It has a full-sized convection oven! It has tons of counter space, including an island! It even has… imagine this… a dishwasher! And the electrical outlets are… gasp… grounded!
But it’s not cheap.
[quote=“Chris”]A friend of a friend lives in a four-story townhouse in a gated community in Xizhi, a community adjacent to Lotus Hill.
His kitchen is huge. It has a full-sized convection oven! It has tons of counter space, including an island! It even has… imagine this… a dishwasher! And the electrical outlets are… gasp… grounded!
But it’s not cheap.[/quote]
thank you for agreeing with me that there are such things as big kitchens in taiwan.
[quote=“llary”]Our house is approx 65 pings with less than 1 ping kitchen space, go figure. Originally we had planned to move somewhere bigger and there was no point ripping out the kitchen but the economy is still not picking up so we will have to stay put a bit longer. My wife is going nuts over our tiny kitchen and spends hours looking wistfully in American kitchen brochures.
The only way to get more kitchen space will be to build an extension with a skylight then make an open plan living room + kitchen. Then my wife would have to be banned from any deep fat frying or our whole living room would be covered in grease.[/quote]
I’ve seen a house with two kitchens in Taiwan … normal ‘western’ cooking in the big indoors kitchen, Chinese cooking and frying in the outdoor veranda kitchen … it was a foreigner that lived there, up near Baishawan …