In the kitchens of the rich, things are not as they seem

The kitchens of the wealthy in the United States today are capable of providing a humbling experience to the uninitiated. Attempts to procure ice cubes can transform the most dignified guest into a hapless burglar rummaging through drawers for loose gems.

"I don't think I've had a client that's wanted to reveal their fridge for a very long time," said Martyn Lawrence Bullard, an English interior designer whose namesake firm in Los Angeles has evanesced major household appliances for the likes of Cher, Tommy Hilfiger and Kylie Jenner. "In the last five years, everything we've done has had a hidden fridge."

Many things that are immediately identifiable as things in the majority of American kitchens — appliances recognizable from their size, shape and the general appearance they have had since roughly the 1940s — are, in the homes of the wealthy, increasingly being transmogrified into cabinets.

"Panel-ready" refrigerators, the facades of which are designed to accommodate (typically via systems of brackets and screws) custom pieces of wood indistinguishable from a kitchen's built-in cabinetry, have become standard. Thus, it is not only possible, but usual, to look at a newly built luxury kitchen and be unable to immediately ascertain whether it contains an icebox.

"Everyone" is covering their stainless steel with panels, said Shannon Wollack, the founder of Studio Life/Style, an interior design firm in West Hollywood, California. "Everyone," she repeated. Among the clients whose kitchens Wollack has transformed into sleek cabinet emporia: actress Hilary Duff, whose blue-paneled kitchen does, despite appearances, include a refrigerator.

Au courant refrigerators resemble the imaginary dragons of childhood fantasy in that they are both invisible and enormous. "You'd be shocked how much space" luxury kitchens devote to hidden refrigeration, Wollack said. "A lot of people," she said, elect to incorporate two refrigerators, side by side.

But the explosion of tidy cubbies and drawers that causes an ultramodern kitchen to resemble the study of a 19th-century apothecary is not merely the result of refrigerators becoming cabinets. Cabinets, too, are becoming refrigerators.

Can I get you a drink?

What are the wealthy manipulating to levels of coldness and freshness — far beyond nature's intrinsic capacity — in quantities requiring such vast storage?

Drinks, mostly.

"They like to have lots of beverages," said Wollack, whose clients include many individuals in the entertainment industry. "A lot of it is beverages." A popular drawer setup, she said, incorporates three small refrigerated partitions: one for wine, one for drinks other than wine and one for fresh produce. Bullard has known clients to use them for storing face creams and beauty products. "A bunch of people put them in their bathrooms now," he said.

Second fridges are not new to American homes. A 2015 survey by the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicated that 30% of the country — around 35 million households in 2015 — could claim at least two refrigerators "plugged in and turned on" in their residence at all times.

Cabinet camouflage is likewise not a modern innovation: For a short time in the 1950s, General Electric advertising copy boasted of a horizontal refrigeration system built to hang "on the wall like a picture," available in colors such as "petal pink" and "turquoise green."

It is expensive to hide top-of-the-line refrigerative technology within one's kitchen. Many of Wollack's clients opt for fridges from Sub-Zero, which are equipped with a magnetic gasket around the edge of the inner door that creates a vacuum seal to lock out warm air.

These appliances — which, she said, "can be easily up to $15,000" — are so committed to their task of cooling, they may at times seem to be working in opposition to their owners: Troubleshooting guidance for customers on the Sub-Zero website explains to customers that, although the company's refrigerators and freezers are not designed to be impenetrable to humans, "depending on the strength of the vacuum, it may seem as if the door is locked."

But while the wealthy are anxious to chill an ever-increasing volume of perishable items, one thing they are increasingly less inclined to do, per Bullard, is freeze them. "Freezing food is becoming less and less fashionable," he said. "People want to eat more organically."

"Most of our clients these days tend to just end up using their freezers for ice and ice cream," he said.

Ice comes now from one of several varieties of squat stand-alone machines dedicated solely to creating ice of a particular shape, texture and clarity. The highest-end panel-ready models of these can cost a few thousand dollars. For those with merely several hundred dollars to spend creating ice, a small unit from GE presents its cache of frozen water as an empyreal glowing mosaic.

Filtered water faucets have been relocated to the sink. "The water filtration system from the fridge is sort of an antiquated look and never pairs well with the built-in cabinetry drawers," Bullard said.

"It's not fashionable," he said. "We haven't used that kind of thing for years."

An inside look

Reality television has served as a venue for average Americans' exposure to high-end refrigeration since the early 2000s. In MTV's "Cribs," a popular documentary-style series in which entertainers — actors, musicians, athletes, the occasional magician — purported to give viewers tours of their private homes, peeks inside refrigerators were a signature element of the show. (Many were stocked primarily with drinks, including, memorably, a supermarket display quantity of Vitaminwater neatly arranged in the refrigerator of 50 Cent.)

Nene Leakes, of the show's Atlanta branch, delivered one of the series' most famous monologues in 2013, on the subject of a refrigerator. In a talking head interview, she appeared distraught as she described the appearance of a hotel in which one of her co-stars was temporarily residing: "It has a white refrigerator!" Leakes wailed, her face a kaleidoscope of pain, horror and disbelief. "I was like 'Oh, hoo! Ooh, not a white refrigerator. Girl, please put your shoes on. Let's go find you a home, honey!' "

The enormous glass closet stocked with baskets of Technicolor-vibrant produce installed in the home of another "Real Housewife," Yolanda Hadid, also drew attention on the show's Beverly Hills franchise. While Hadid left the show in 2016, a Twitter account with the handle @YolandasFridge created during her tenure occasionally still tweets in character as her transparent appliance to an audience of more than 14,000 followers.

Despite the visual appeal of Hadid's lushly stocked fridge, most clients "don't go with the glass front — as much as they would like to," Wollack said.

All-glass fridges require a level of maintenance generally incompatible with human life. "You have to be organized and keep your fridge very, very tidy," Bullard said. "Otherwise it doesn't look good at all. And they're very expensive. They're 15,000, 20,000 dollars."

For people desiring to acquire knowledge of the contents of their refrigerators without opening them, Bullard might instead install a refrigerator with a camera inside ("so that you, or your housekeeper in this case, perhaps" can check in while on a shopping trip to see what's running low, he said). Some shelving systems will soon come equipped with weight sensors designed to detect how much product is left in a particular container, Bullard said.

Wollack and Bullard both said that the fervor for concealing appliances resulted from kitchens increasingly being used as rooms for casual congregation, rather than as areas dedicated exclusively to the preparation of food.

"Kitchens used to be concealed," Wollack said. "It had a door. That was where you had all your appliances. It was like the work space. And now, kitchens are more of a lifestyle. You want to make it pretty and seamless."

These spaces are being furnished "as living rooms," Bullard said. "We add art. You add expensive lighting. The island becomes sort of the modern-day dining table." (The real dining table remains confined to a separate, less-used room.)

A spokesperson for Sub-Zero confirmed that panel-ready models of the company's refrigerators are "especially popular in major metropolitan areas." Bullard said the fastest way for kitchen trends to spread is through images on social media. In the past few years, he said, Instagram has inspired a blitz of green-colored kitchens.

But some luxury kitchen amenities remain out of reach for even the wealthiest shoppers — amenities including the very fridges they hope to hide.

Bullard was recently tasked with hunting down a catering fridge for a client's chef. "We could not find it anywhere," he said. Eventually, he located a pre-owned model. The final price for the used refrigerator: $18,000.

"You do," he said, "what you must."