Ashley Munroe accepts an invitation to Fitchburg, Wisconsin, where the Village's kitchens are actually made. Dual refrigeration, red knobs, and a road named after a temperature.
The President accepted an invitation to visit Sub-Zero in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. Several Members sent kitchen questions before she left.
The President left Lincoln Park early on Tuesday and arrived in Fitchburg shortly after ten.
The facility sits on Sub-Zero Parkway.
“They named the street,” she said at the gate. She took a photograph of the sign for the Members who had asked for appliance pictures.
What is actually there
Two hundred acres. Roughly two thousand people, of the company's three thousand, work in this one place. Every refrigerator the Society has ever admired, leaned against, or quietly opened at a party in Wicker Park was built in a building the President could see from the parking lot.
The company was founded in 1945 by Westye Bakke, in Madison, and the reason is not a marketing story. Bakke's young son Bud had juvenile diabetes, insulin needed cold storage, and reliable cold storage did not exist. He built the first prototype in his basement in 1943, out of scrap metal, bending the coils by hand because there was a war on and there was nothing else to bend them with.
He had, before this, done custom refrigeration work for Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ashley had expected to spend most of the visit looking at kitchens. She was pleased to learn something about the person who had started the company.
In 1955 the company pioneered dual refrigeration — two separate sealed systems, so that the freezer and the refrigerator never share air. This is why your ice does not taste like fish. The President had never once wondered why her ice did not taste like fish, and reports that learning the answer was “a lot.”
The kitchen
The Society was shown a working kitchen, all white, with several appliances Ashley wanted to see at home. She opened every door and asked whether she could take photographs.
The ranges are Wolf, acquired by the company in 2000 and launched the same year with fifty products at once. The dishwashers are Cove, which arrived in 2018 and which the Society is prepared to describe as the quietest thing in any room it has been in, including the Member Portal.
The red knobs are heavier than they look.
The President turned a knob, turned it back, and tried it again. “Oh, I like that,” she said.
A note on dual fuel. Gas above, electric convection below — introduced in 2003. Members will recall the Society's position on flapjacks, which has not changed and now has a factory behind it.
What she was told, and believed
Every major function on every unit is tested before it ships. Not a sample. Every one. The appliances are designed to last a minimum of twenty years.
The President asked what happens if something fails in year nineteen. She made a note to ask about service coverage before placing an order.
She has repeated this to four Members and her contractor.
The remodel
On the drive home Ashley reconsidered the kitchen plan. By Rockford she wanted to move the refrigerator, which meant moving the pantry. She sent her contractor the photographs before they reached Lincoln Park.
The Society was given a tour and a glass of water. Ashley would like to go back when she has settled on the pantry.
The President thanks her hosts in Fitchburg. She has asked that the photograph of Sub-Zero Parkway be included with the kitchen pictures.