The utility room is where many of the more intimate aspects of our family life unfold: parenting conferences about so-called “natural consequences,” muttered curse words, and quick visits with my secret chocolate stash. For one strange month last January, it was also where I read several Stephen King novels in bite-size increments between dinner prep and bath time. And maybe that is why I keep thinking about its architectural cousin and opposite: what I call the aspirational pantry.

I first encountered one in early 2020, when designer Sarah Sherman Samuel posted a blog about the former bathroom she turned into what she called “the pantry of my dreams.” Pantries and utility rooms are meant to store different things, but both are supposed to absorb household overflow. What struck me was that hers seemed designed not for overflow at all, but for display. It was storage transformed into an object of aspiration.

The space itself was meticulously staged with elegant, custom open shelving, including a niche just for mugs, and shallow, half-open drawers so “you can still see what is in each.” Her microwave, toaster, and tea kettle sat on shiny white countertops, plugged in and ready. Even the main refrigerator, also white, was tucked into a wall to be “visually out of the way but still located with super easy access,” she explained in the blog. “I love having a clutter-free kitchen,” she wrote.

The aspirational pantry is an Instagram-age update of an old architectural logic to hide the work that makes domestic ease possible, often reinforcing exploitative racial and gender hierarchies in the process. On plantations and estates, enslaved Black cooks labored in detached outbuildings so the heat, smell, and violence of the kitchen remained invisible to the white household. Historian Jennifer L. Morgan’s work shows how this kind of spatial separation helped normalize white domestic comfort by keeping the coercion and bodily costs of enslaved women’s labor out of everyday sight. In 19th-century urban houses, that separation moved indoors. Kitchens, sculleries, pantries, and larders formed a backstage suite where the lowest-ranking servant, often a young immigrant woman, handled the wet, airless, punishing work that made bourgeois comfort and refinement possible.