What is it with this recent fad to hide kitchens?

The charming missus and myself stopped off this morning to peek at the show suite for a nearby housing development. We are in the process of buying a house and I was a little worried we might see this place and decide it was much better than the house we had just committed to buying. Fortunately, this was not the case. It had two small bedrooms, three bathrooms and a narrow, unwelcoming kitchen shut off from the rest of the house with one small window.

It baffles me that they picked this flat with this kitchen as their show suite. After spending two seconds in it, I was relieved. There was no way they could possibly make the place cheap enough for me to want to buy it with a kitchen like that. It's not that I'm a super keen cook, mind you. But I do like to keep the Missus company when she is slaving over a hot stove.

For me, the kitchen is the most important room in the house. It's where you prepare your food. It's where you wash your dishes. It's where you make tea. You can even have sex in it as long as you clean up at yourselves properly.

DIY stores understand this. If you go into any DIY store anywhere in the world you will find them, for the most part, soulless, uninviting warehouses each containing one shining oasis in their centre: the kitchen display area.

Now that I think about it, I bet the DIY stores are in cahoots with the builders. They suck you into buying a place with a display lounge full of ornamental pelicans and leather sofas. As soon as you move in and go to make your first post-coital mug of tea you realise the kitchen needs to be redone, and so your run off to the DIY store. It wouldn't surprise me if this housing development was actually built by the B&Q.