The renovation drawings people bring me have a cooktop on the island bench seven or eight times in ten. Four burners, facing the sofa, and in the render there is someone tossing a pan and grinning.
I usually ask whether they actually stir-fry at home.
What the old books say
Classical yang-dwelling method, the branch of feng shui that deals with houses for the living, treats three things as the essentials of a house: the front door, the main bedroom, and the stove. The stove, zao, is on that list for an obvious reason. The family’s food comes out of it.
The placement formula is zuo sha xiang ji. The stove sits on an inauspicious direction and faces an auspicious one, so that fire pins down the bad quarter while the good quarter is drawn in through the opening.
That sounds abstract until you look at the object it was written for. A traditional Chinese stove is a masonry block, built in place, immovable. It has a definite back, the side against the wall, and a definite mouth, the opening you feed wood into. You could stand there with a compass and measure both.
Nobody has one of those any more.
The stove mouth doesn’t exist now
Where is the mouth on an induction hob? Some take the side the power cable enters, some the side the knobs face. A third group takes the side the cook stands on, which I have never been able to follow, since the cook moves. I have heard all three argued seriously by colleagues, each with an internally consistent case, none of them persuaded by the others.
I can’t settle it, and I don’t pretend to. What I do is leave the mouth out of the reading and work from the seat only: what the stove has behind it, and which way that wall runs. When a client asks specifically whether a southwest-facing stove mouth is good, they want a yes or a no and I don’t have one for them. Some senior practitioners rule on it without hesitating. I would rather tell the client that the object that rule was measuring is gone.
What survives the change of fuel
Something solid behind it. Sydney’s seventies and eighties brick housing has small kitchens where the cooktop very often sits under the back window. Open the window and the draught comes straight across. With a wood or gas flame that meant the fire guttered and the cooking was uneven. With an electric hob the trouble is different. The extraction fan loses the plume to the cross-draught and does almost nothing, and the person cooking has the run from the kitchen door out to the laundry and the back yard behind their shoulders, so they stand half-turned the whole time without noticing. Cook there for twenty minutes and you feel it.
Not directly opposite the sink, and not jammed up against it. The classical phrase is water clashing with fire, which I avoid saying out loud, because people immediately start thinking about the five phases instead of about their own kitchen. In practice you are shuttling between the two busiest points in the room, with wet hands and a hot pan competing for the same stretch of bench. Narrow galley kitchens in Sydney apartments are the worst offenders, sink and cooktop side by side with twenty centimetres between them. My minimum is a run of preparation bench in between that will take a chopping board, sixty centimetres and up.
There is no old rule about the fridge, because there were no fridges, and it is now the most common thing I find: Australian kitchen plans lock the cavity in early and the joiners put it at whichever end is convenient, which is regularly the end the cooktop is on, so one appliance dumps heat while the other spends years removing it, and half a body stands in front of the burners every time the door opens. You could make a five-phase argument about fire next to water; I ask people to put a hand flat on the side panel of the fridge instead.
The rule about the stove being visible from the front door I do still keep. A stove you can see from the entry is sitting on a through-route, every time.
The island bench is a form the classics never saw
This is where most of my time goes now.
Open plan with an island has been the Australian standard for twenty years, and the first move in any renovation is knocking out the wall between kitchen and living room. The old books have nothing on this. Their kitchen was a separate room, and in a well-off household sometimes a separate structure in the yard, deliberately walled off from where the family sat. Every stove rule assumes an enclosed room.
Take away the assumption and the rules don’t port. What ports is the wall, the backing and the walking route.
Measure an island cooktop against those and it has none of them. An island is open on four sides. There is no wall behind the cook, people pass on both flanks, and extraction is either a hood dropped from the ceiling or a downdraft unit built into the bench. Both are expensive, and in an apartment there is usually nowhere to send the air. The façade and the risers are common property, so it goes to the owners corporation first, and most buildings never left a duct route anyway. That leaves a recirculating unit, which copes with a seared steak and is decorative against a wok.
So my usual advice is: cooktop on a wall, island for the sink, the prep and the eating. I didn’t invent that arrangement. Plenty of kitchen designers land on it for their own reasons, mainly that oil spatter on a stone island is miserable to clean.
Newer Australian houses often have a butler’s pantry behind the main kitchen. If someone is set on the island cooktop, that is the first thing I ask about, and whether the heavy frying can move in there. When it can, most of my objection goes away.
Rules I let go of
The stove must not face a well. Nobody has a well. What that rule was protecting against survives as the sink.
No drain running under the stove. In an apartment there is a sewer stack under most of the floor plan. I don’t read it.
Then there is a whole family of rules about firewood and ash. Which direction you feed from, not letting ash build up, never leaving the firebox cold overnight. None of these has anything to point at on an electric hob. Colleagues translate them into “keep the stove clean” and “don’t run it empty”, which I think is life support for a rule that already died. Keeping the kitchen clean is a good habit on its own terms, and that is all it is.
I get asked about the Kitchen God shrine more than I used to. Traditionally it goes above the stove or slightly to one side. Which way it should face varies by region: I have been told south, and I have been told it should look towards the kitchen door. Here I have seen them mounted on the cupboard door above the rangehood, and, where nothing else was reachable, stuck to the side of the fridge. Neither is ideal, and I don’t usually push anyone to move theirs.
One last practical thing. If your kitchen works, don’t tear it out for feng shui reasons. A kitchen is the most expensive room in an Australian renovation once you count joinery, stone and relocating plumbing and power. Anything load-bearing needs council approval in a freestanding house and strata approval in an apartment, and the plumbing and electrical work goes to licensed trades, which is not my end of the job. Of the kitchens I have looked at, very few needed structural work. Most needed the fridge moved, or sixty centimetres of bench put in between the hob and the sink, and in a few cases nothing beyond putting the pans in a different drawer.