The Aspirational Pantry Is a Scam

Sometimes I have to brace myself just to open the utility room door. I live in a 1920s Berkeley bungalow with my spouse, our five- and seven-year-old kids, and our dog who believes every sock is a personal gift. My partner is an architect, and just before the pandemic we bought a fixer-upper and decided (against all better judgment) to renovate it ourselves with help from generous friends and family in our Covid bubble. Now, most of the house is beautiful: clean lines, clever storage, and forest-green tile laid in a herringbone pattern.

But we never got around to designing the utility room. Its open shelves are crammed with laundry detergent bottles, cast-off art supplies, orphaned socks, and dog chews. It smells like heat and effort and low-grade panic.

The utility room is where many of the more intimate aspects of our family life unfold: parenting conferences about so-called "natural consequences," muttered curse words, and quick visits with my secret chocolate stash. For one strange month last January, it was also where I read several Stephen King novels in bite-size increments between dinner prep and bath time. And maybe that is why I keep thinking about its architectural cousin and opposite: what I call the aspirational pantry.

I first encountered one in early 2020, when designer Sarah Sherman Samuel posted a blog about the former bathroom she turned into what she called "the pantry of my dreams." Pantries and utility rooms are meant to store different things, but both are supposed to absorb household overflow. What struck me was that hers seemed designed not for overflow at all, but for display. It was storage transformed into an object of aspiration.

The space itself was meticulously staged with elegant, custom open shelving, including a niche just for mugs, and shallow, half-open drawers so "you can still see what is in each." Her microwave, toaster, and tea kettle sat on shiny white countertops, plugged in and ready. Even the main refrigerator, also white, was tucked into a wall to be "visually out of the way but still located with super easy access," she explained in the blog. "I love having a clutter-free kitchen," she wrote.

Samuel, a sought-after interior designer whose work circulates widely across design blogs and social media (she also had her own Magnolia Network home improvement show), was posting in a cultural moment already saturated with fantasies of domestic order on the heels of Marie Kondo’s viral 2010s minimalism. Just look to Kim Kardashian’s early 2020 Instagram Story pantry tour that turned food storage into a public performance of abundance and control. At the time, it looked like a stylish personal solution. In hindsight, it feels like an early glimpse of a design logic that was about to further take over our living spaces.

Now, even the word "pantry" feels inadequate. A whole taxonomy of secondary kitchen spaces has emerged. Design magazines—Dwell included—celebrate back kitchens, dirty kitchens, sculleries, butler’s pantries, larders, and appliance garages for their ability to help make homekeeping feel not just more beautiful, but more manageable. The names vary, but the fantasy is consistent: the mess, noise, and labor of daily life can be sealed behind a door so the main kitchen can perform effortlessness. A 2022 New York Times feature described the rise of "a kitchen for the kitchen…in essence, a pantry on overdrive." Industry forecasts, homebuilding platforms, and design media all suggest that larger kitchens with hidden work zones are becoming a standard home feature rather than a luxury add-on. Google searches for terms like "modern pantry," "hidden kitchen," and "back kitchen" have nearly doubled in the past five years, and according to the 2026 Houzz Kitchen Trends Study, 47 percent of participants cited pantry cabinets as their top-priority built-in kitchen feature. The desire for a space in the home that absorbs mess may be evolving, but it isn’t new. American domestic architecture has a long history of keeping the work that holds a household together—and the people who perform it—out of view.

What the appliance pantry offers is not relief but substitution: order in place of redistribution, and cabinetry in place of shared labor.

The aspirational pantry is an Instagram-age update of an old architectural logic to hide the work that makes domestic ease possible, often reinforcing exploitative racial and gender hierarchies in the process. On plantations and estates, enslaved Black cooks labored in detached outbuildings so the heat, smell, and violence of the kitchen remained invisible to the white household. Historian Jennifer L. Morgan’s work shows how this kind of spatial separation helped normalize white domestic comfort by keeping the coercion and bodily costs of enslaved women’s labor out of everyday sight. In 19th-century urban houses, that separation moved indoors. Kitchens, sculleries, pantries, and larders formed a backstage suite where the lowest-ranking servant, often a young immigrant woman, handled the wet, airless, punishing work that made bourgeois comfort and refinement possible.

By the early 20th century, as domestic staff shrank and middle-class families still wanted formal meals to seem effortless, those hidden rooms condensed into a single shining threshold between kitchen and dining room: the butler’s pantry. It functioned as a buffer where the signs of labor could be erased before food reached the table.

After World War II, the role of the "house servant" largely disappeared in the U.S., and with it went the service wing. But the fantasy remained. Industrial wages, home appliances, and suburban housing designs made domestic staff scarce, even as ideals of cheerful, self-sufficient homemaking were widely promoted. Now women across class lines were expected to perform cleanliness and composure in plain view. The architecture no longer hid the laborer. It trained her to hide herself.

Open floor plans grew in popularity in the mid-20th century, becoming the norm by the 1990s and facilitating more household togetherness and transparency, but not without some quiet zones of concealment tucked into the layout.

The fantasy is powerful because it makes a structural problem feel like a personal project.

When our homes also became workplaces, classrooms, and daycares overnight during the pandemic, the appeal of hidden, hyperordered kitchens circulated as a fantasy of manageability, and, importantly, the wealth to afford it. Even for those who could only afford to desire it, the aspirational pantry offered an image of calm and control at a moment when domestic life felt most uncontainable: a promise that if the mess could be sealed off, the strain might be, too.

We may be out of lockdown, but many of the conditions that made that fantasy so compelling remain. More people work from home. Public institutions and civic life are under strain. Houses are still being asked to absorb pressures that used to be distributed across workplaces, schools, and public institutions. What the appliance pantry offers is not relief but substitution: order in place of redistribution, and cabinetry in place of shared labor. With that comes a calibrated promise that calm is always one more organization overhaul away. You could build the order you aspire to in a spare closet with the right containers and a free weekend, even as the ideal being modeled (often with the help of influencer partnerships and paid support staff) still requires time, money, and ongoing labor to maintain. The fantasy is powerful because it makes a structural problem feel like a personal project.

For generations, domestic labor has rested on women and on racialized workers, and even as we disavow those arrangements politically, we have not replaced them with shared or public systems of care—affordable childcare, eldercare, predictable school and work schedules, meal programs, and basic household supports that don’t depend on private wealth or individual scrambling. So the pressure returns to the household, and we aestheticize our way around it. We redesign the kitchen, and map the problem onto the floor plan. The good version of womanhood performs in the open-concept kitchen, calm and curated and endlessly accommodating. The other one, the self with needs and sweat and limits, gets hidden away with the microwave.

I get the appeal. My kitchen is a high-functioning mess. But with an aspirational pantry, the labor isn’t gone. It’s only displaced. Dinner still has to be made. The narrow utility room keeps no secrets either. It isn’t serene but it is honest, and because the effort is out in the open, it becomes harder to ignore that there is work being done.

Design can do real things. It can make a room feel welcoming, pull people into the kitchen, set the tone for a party, make daily life feel a little more held. But it can’t carry what we’re asking homes to carry now. Hiding the mess doesn’t make it lighter. Sometimes it only makes it lonelier. A room that admits the mess also admits the people doing it, and that kind of imperfect, unstyled visibility can make the responsibility easier to share.

Also, it gives you somewhere to hide the chocolate.

Related Reading:

What Ever Happened to Laundry Chutes?

The Death of the Bar Cart