KITCHEN BACKSPLASH IDEAS ABOVE STOVE
microwaves had gotten very popular butlike everybody noticed they were getting bigger and bigger and taking up more andmore counter space and we tried to come up with different configurations to getthem off of the countertop. and we tried several. replacing a surface unit on therange with a small microwave which would have been very small. replacing part ofthe oven with a microwave, which would have limited your oven space. and finallywe decided to try it above the oven on an americano range, which was a high-low range and take the upper oven, which is a conventional oven, and replace it with amicrowave oven. so that got it off the countertop altogether. at that time i wasdoing different mock-ups and they were
made out of foam core which is verylight and i had it stuck to a pegboard wall and i had a range down below andthe center part between the upper and lower oven was called the belly band andi was just finishing pinning this thing to the wall and marty pitstick ,who isanother range designer, walked by and he said "well that looks pretty good withoutthe belly band." and then we started talking -- "why do you need to makepeople buy the whole americana range just to get the microwave?" and all of asudden we thought, all we need is the spacemaker up above. when i designed the thing i took a lasagna dish and made it a little wider than that, it took a bigdinner plate and made it deeper than
that,and a pretty good sized casserole dish with a glass lid and made a taller thanthat. you're not gonna try and cook a turkey in a microwave. marketing was afraidof it at first because the oven wasn't very big, but we could get everything youneeded to do in the oven. but more than that, the feature that it really had wasit freed up your space on the countertop. i had almost forgotten that the thinghad sat in a room for a couple of years before it went into production, when ourvice president dick donegan saw it he didn't even want to survey it, he justwanted to get it in production now. there was such an urgent rush to get it intoproduction when we got finally got it
approved,i think this was the only product i designed that went from initial mock-upsto production with no changes. that's every designers dream, is to havesomething go out and "i'll be darned, that's exactly where i designed it." you