Hulihe’e Palace doesn’t include a kitchen on the tour. Neither does Taliesin or Lincoln’s Cottage. What’s up with that?
Kitchens can be difficult. Any real estate agent will tell you that kitchens go out of date faster than any other room. So, houses that were lived in continuously for decades are bound to have seen at least one if not several updates. Which means that the decision must made whether to take the kitchen back to its original appearance or something in between—perhaps when the most famous resident lived there—or not to include it at all.
The kitchens of old Southern houses were usually detached from the main house. Some say from fear of out-of-control fire burning down the house; however, it’s more likely because the heat generated from cooking was unwelcome in an already hot climate. Regardless of why, the detached kitchens may not have survived (Hulihe’e Palace) or preservationists lack the funds to restore them (Lincoln’s Cottage).
However, in Taliesin, the kitchen is not on the tour because master architect Frank Lloyd Wright found such functional spaces as kitchens and bathrooms boring and therefore did nothing with them. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing a functional kitchen of the period, but it is not to be.