At last a kitchen that looks like mine. If this indeed is Justine Thornton and Ed Miliband’s kitchen — revealed in their BBC interview this week — it’s minimalist, unpretentious and, er, barely lived in.
It’s fair to say that I’m not a committed cook. Out most evenings at the theatre, I survive on packet salad and baked potatoes.
Which is why the Miliband galley kitchen, with its monochrome decor, thrillingly ordinary oven (mine was left by the former owner when I moved in 15 years ago) and wall-to-wall Formica units, looks so refreshing.
Kitchens are the last frontier in middle-class one-upmanship. These days the open-plan show kitchen is supposed to be the social hub of the house — zoned into cooking, dining and living areas — so you can whip up supper while keeping an eye on the little darlings.
The Milibands live in a four-bedroom Victorian house near Hampstead Heath. One might expect the usual design clichés of a north London professional couple — colourful Verner Panton chairs, an oversized clock, a range cooker.
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The Milibands don’t even seem to have a kitchen table, preferring to lean against the sink to chat, mug of tea in hand. The message is these are busy people who have better things to do than cook.
True the interior looks a bit “unfinished”. I blush inwardly when the style guru Stephen Bayley informs me “the Miliband kitchen looks as if it was just recently abandoned by cynical and maladroit builders when the budget ran out”. So like the House of Hoggard.
Yet how many of us have a spare £25,000 to spend on making over our kitchen as SamCam did at Downing Street, which now boasts a stainless steel “theatre kitchen”, kitted out with an oval marble table, Arco floor lamp and black wooden dresser?
Ed’s modest kitchen speaks of his pedigree and upbringing, according to the design writer Dominic Lutyens, author of Living with Mid-Century Collectibles. “His father Ralph, being a Marxist academic, would probably have lived in a pretty utilitarian home that reflected a non-materialistic outlook on life. Ed seems to idolise his father and perhaps he’s just inherited his taste?”
The faux granite worktop is very Eighties, he notes. “The fact they may not have updated their kitchen for years, suggests they are concerned with higher matters. It’s so different from the acquisitive image of the Blairs!”
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True the milking stools are too low; the fluoro-green bin is awful. But hurrah for a family too busy to prop the kitchen like a West End play — with the ubiquitous hand-print paintings, faux-comic mugs and Jamie saucepans.
It makes the Milibands look open, transparent (they don’t even shut their blinds), while the Cameron kitchen is a bit design victim-y (in a Notting Hill, trend-conscious banker sort of way).
Although, as one property expert observes wryly: “You can tell the Milibands have never sold a house in their lives.”