The Return of the Working Kitchen

Behind the show kitchen, a second one is doing the actual cooking—and America's top designers say that split is now a fixture of serious house planning. The dirty kitchen, built for prep, storage, and mess a room away from where guests gather, has held its place as one of the most requested spaces in high-end design. Getting it right, pros note, is less about square footage than sequence: where the mess starts, where it ends, and how little of it a guest ever sees.

With reporting from Architectural Digest.