The thorniest room to construct, in any type of building, is the kitchen. Which is what Armelle Coutant and Candice Delamarre learned from speaking with more than 200 people in the construction industry as part of a group project for their master’s program in civil and environmental engineering. To build a kitchen, skilled workers—carpenters, electricians, plumbers, tilers—from as many as eight trades rotate through a construction site in a delicate dance of coordination. A fractional mistake from any of them can bring an entire project to a halt.
After graduating, Coutant, ’19, MS ’21, and Delamarre, MS ’21, co-founded Kit Switch, a public benefit corporation that creates and installs machine-made, prefabricated kitchens with the goal of simplifying the design and construction process. “It’s hard to standardize a kitchen at large, and that’s why we decided we were going to standardize smaller blocks and make it modular,” says Delamarre. The building blocks—one with a stove, another with a sink, a third focused on storage—are visually indistinguishable from traditional versions except that they are deeper; a large panel on the back holds the electrical and plumbing components. Thanks to that panel and the modular design, the kitchens require two workers just a day to install, rather than the typical weeks to months, with no special skills required.
“It’s more labor efficient, it’s more cost efficient, it’s more schedule friendly,” says Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute, an international trade association. It’s also safer, he says, because it eliminates the need to customize materials on site. All that’s welcome in an industry responsible for 20 percent of U.S. workplace deaths, in a country facing skilled labor and housing shortages.
Last year, Kit Switch installed six kitchens around California, and it has larger-scale projects in the works. The co-founders are currently expanding kit offerings to include bathrooms and more, aiming to create flexible buildings capable of responding to changing needs. “The interiors are really what determines whether a building becomes obsolete,” says Coutant. For her and Delamarre, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Photography and Illustration: Kit Switch
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
