Score another advance in the ’90s cocooning trend toward ever-more-elaborate master bedrooms. First, came the fireplace and a little sitting area. Then the exercise equipment, huge dressing rooms and luxurious his-and-hers bathrooms. Everything but the kitchen sink.
Now that’s arrived, too. Literally.
When Ayse Kenmore wants her morning coffee, she doesn’t have to leave her bedroom to get it. In whichever of her three homes she may find herself, Mrs. Kenmore, a retired marketing executive, gets her mornings going in the small kitchen tucked into her master-bedroom suite.
“It may seem self-indulgent,” says Kenmore, 57, “but I use it all the time.”
Architects and builders of high-end homes report that buyers and owners increasingly are asking for mini-kitchens in their master suites.
The units — which can range from just a hotel-style minibar and coffee maker to more elaborate layouts with microwaves, small stove tops, and, yes, sinks — are quickly becoming the latest must-have features of the ever-expanding American home.
It’s part of a double-headed home trend that has seen the overall square footage for houses rise sharply in the past 10 years while the masters and mistresses of the manors retreat into their own private domains.
“People want to escape from the outside world — and that includes getting away from the rest of the family,” says Bob Mirman, president of National Survey Systems of Irvine, Calif., which conducts an annual survey of home-buyer preferences in California. “Kids live at home longer. Often, they come back after college. And parents and kids both want their space.”
Often called breakfast bars or coffee bars, a well-equipped mini-kitchen can add about $8,000 to the cost of a high-end house, says Dan Jacobs, a principal with the architectural firm JBZ Dorius Architects in Irvine, Calif. For most breakfast bar owners, cost and size aren’t big issues, however. It’s the pampering that counts.
“It gives me the same luxury I’d find in a hotel suite, but I’m not paying $10 for macadamia nuts,” says Steve Parag, who designed his relatively modest 2,600-square-foot Tampa, Fla., home to include a mini-kitchen just outside his bedroom door.
“It’s a little indulgence, but it’s very convenient,” adds his wife, Ronda. “It was wonderful when I first had my son, Evan. We wouldn’t have to run downstairs in the middle of the night to heat up his bottle. Everything was right there.”
All right, so maybe walking down a flight of stairs to grab a drink or a baby’s bottle isn’t a big deal. But people are asking, “Why bother if I don’t have to?”
“It’s a long way to the kitchen,” says Leonard McCue. He and his wife, Barbara, consider the breakfast bar in their bedroom a must. Their home in St. Petersburg, Fla., is more than 10,000 square feet.
“I totally believe in it,” says Kenmore. “It sounds super lazy, but I find when I want a drink or a snack I don’t have to leave my space or my state of mind.”
The master bedroom in her East Hampton, N.Y., home has a kitchen that includes a refrigerator, an ice maker, a microwave and even a dishwasher. The master suite of her house on Fire Island, N.Y., has a mini-refrigerator. And in San Francisco, a refrigerator and microwave oven are part of the master bath.
“I’m the kind of person who must have my ice cream before I go to sleep,” she says. “It’s just more convenient to have it in the bedroom than to go all the way downstairs.”
A decade ago, breakfast bars were found only in sprawling, custom-designed mansions, where it was a serious trek from the master bedroom to the kitchen, builders and architects say. But now mini-kitchens are also appearing in average-size homes like the Parags’ and in high-end production models. Home builders have starting offering coffee bars as options.
For Toll Brothers Inc., a Huntingdon Valley, Pa., builder of luxury production homes in 15 states, the bedroom breakfast bar concept evolved from customer feedback, says its vice president of marketing, Kira McCarron. Home buyers started requesting them, and they now come as a standard feature in some models, she says. In other models the breakfast bar is offered as an option, but more and more customers are opting for the addition when they see it in model homes, she says.
Taylor Woodrow Homes Inc. of Laguna Hills, Calif., also includes breakfast bars in some models, according to Jessica Fabricant, the company’s marketing manager. And Christopher Homes, a builder of luxury homes in Las Vegas, offers the breakfast bar as an option — one that buyers elect about 15 percent of the time, according to the company’s president and chief executive officer, J. Christopher Stuhmer.
Architects and trend trackers say the growing popularity of the bedroom mini-kitchen demonstrates just how much Americans long for privacy. All day long they are barraged with information, and they want a space in which they can decompress. And for many, the bedroom has become the sanctuary of choice.
“We’re putting fireplaces, kitchens and Stairmasters in master bedrooms because people don’t want to go into a space where they might run into someone,” says Barry Berkus, a principal with B3 Architects in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Still, the indulgence isn’t for everyone. When Barbara Pollock saw a breakfast bar in the master bedroom of the 4,000-foot home she eventually bought in Atlanta, she thought it would be “neat” to have it there.
“But frankly, I rarely use it,” she says now. “I would love to just get rid of it.”
