The big conundrum: Mud room or utility room or butler’s pantry or…

By Darren Bond

Moving on, or out, from the kitchen, what makes the perfect mud room?

I guess the first question is: is this the proper name for it? What we’re thinking of is the room that’s between the garden and the kitchen. Perhaps it’s a utility room. Hasn’t it also been called the butler’s pantry? My sense is “mud room” but John’s thinking “utility room.” The great debate is on!

Okay, so thinking about functionality first, then coming back to the name…

Pantry: in our last place, there was a small room off the kitchen with nothing but floor to ceiling shelves. It was perfect for various items like tinned goods, cleaning products, large cooking pieces such as the Christmas roaster, bags, recycling, wine bottles, sugar, flour, etc.

Laundry: is this where the washing machine and dryer should go? Or, should it be right next to the master bedroom? Given that it will likely be a one-level home, and fairly compact at that at around 1,500 square feet, perhaps it doesn’t matter so much. On a more fanciful notion, John has suggested a laundry chute down to the basement and put them there. Hmmm.

Dirty dog: I know a Schnauzer that gets dirty and grassy paws during his thrice-daily walks. Hornby Island isn’t exactly sidewalk heaven. What would be perfect, we think, is a low-to-the-floor washing stall to easily rinse him off. He has learned the word bath and trots right into the bathroom and gets ready to be lifted in to the tub. Maybe he could be trained to pull on a cord and do himself? (Note to Judy: another opportunity for a drain in this room!)

Vegetable prep: I’m romantically assuming I’ll have bright orange carrots with bushy green tops and potatoes with marvelous chunks of dirt attached. I’m imagining a sink area with sharp knives and composting. From there they can go in to the kitchen and into the fridge.

Dirty shoes and boots: we don’t want this room turning into the main entrance, and I suspect it won’t if it’s somehow down around the corner of the house, but you can’t be coming in from the garden or beach and not need a place to put footwear and rain coats.

Freezer: in addition to having the opportunity hopefully to freeze our bounty, there will likely be the need to buy larger quantities of staples from “in town.”

It could be that this room is getting too multi-purpose and busy. Perhaps more thought is needed on two fronts: the dreaded basement concept and the main entryway/foyer. What about canning? What about a root cellar?

To Wikipedia for some assistance, here are a few definitions of key words (wow, they have a whole set of architectural terms).

An entryway is a hall that is generally located at the front entrance of a house. An entryway often has a coat closet, and usually has linoleum or tile flooring rather than carpet, making it an easy-to-clean transition space between the outdoor and indoor areas. Many houses do not have an entryway; in these the front door leads to a foyer, or directly into the living room or some other room in the house.

Most houses with main-entrance entryways are located outside the United States, as most modern American houses lack them. However, many suburban American houses have a mud room, a casual entryway to a secondary entrance, which often includes the laundry room. A mud room can be a useful addition as it helps to keep the house clean.

How about:

A pantry is a room where food, provisions or dishes are stored and served in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen. The derivation of the word is from the same source as the Old French term paneterie; that is from pain, the French form of the Latin pan for bread.

In a late medieval hall, there were separate rooms for the various service functions and food storage. A pantry was where bread was kept and food preparation associated with it done. The head of the office responsible for this room was referred to as a pantler. There were similar rooms for storage of baconand other meats (larder), alcoholic beverages (buttery) known for the “butts” of barrels stored there, and cooking (kitchen).

In America, pantries evolved from Early American “butteries”, built in a cold north corner of a Colonial home [more commonly referred to and spelled as "butt'ry"], into a variety of pantries in self-sufficient farmsteads. Butler’s pantries, or china pantries, were built between the dining room and kitchen of a middle class English or American home, especially in the latter part of the 19th into the early 20th centuries.

So, help us out here. What the heck is this room? It seems pretty important and functional.