The scullery — a small secondary kitchen historically used for washing up, food prep, and storage, tucked behind the main kitchen and out of guests' sight — largely disappeared from house plans through the mid-twentieth century as kitchens became the social center of the home. It's now one of the most requested rooms in new custom house plans, for almost the opposite reason it originally existed.

Modern open-plan living put the kitchen on permanent display, visible from the dining and living areas, which means the mess of actual cooking — the used pans, the food processor mid-task, the grocery bags waiting to be unpacked — is also on permanent display. A scullery gives that mess somewhere to go, out of the sightline of the main kitchen entirely.

The main kitchen is for cooking in front of people. The scullery is for everything you don't want them to see.

In current plans, the room typically holds a second sink, open shelving for small appliances, the primary pantry storage, and often the washing machine — consolidating the unglamorous, frequent tasks of running a kitchen into a space that never needs to look presentable.

The main kitchen, freed of that pressure, is increasingly designed as a more minimal, almost showroom-like space: fewer visible appliances, less counter clutter, sometimes no visible cooktop hood at all, because the heavier cooking and cleanup can happen out of sight in the room behind it.

The trend tracks closely with the resurgence of butler's pantries in the 2010s, but the current version of the scullery is doing more work — it's less a wine-and-glassware staging area and more a genuine second kitchen, sized and equipped to be used every single day.