Prior to World War II, the only homes to have complete kitchen spaces also typically had servants to make use of them, while apartments and tenement housing rarely had space for a room purely dedicated to cooking. The kitchen, in other words, was a luxury before a plan to make it more standard and efficient was conceived by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the first Austrian women to qualify as an architect. 

Schütte-Lihotzky's invention, known as the Frankfurt Kitchen, was compact enough to fit into apartment buildings and boasted ingenious features including, according to Sarah Archer, "an electric stove, a window over the sink, and lots of ingenious built-in storage including custom aluminum bins with a spout at one end." Its compact layout was determined by the typical cooking/cleaning sequences of the time, significantly reducing the time one spent in the space. Its efficient use of space not only made it more feasible in the typical home, but it was also its most attractive feature.

While the Frankfurt Kitchen has received criticism in feminist literature as a tool for the further allocation of women to kitchen labor, Archer argues that "Schütte-Lihotzky believed that housework was a profession and deserved to be treated seriously as such. This counted as feminism in the 1920s, and although we might find it essentializing or insulting today, making housework easier was considered a form of emancipation for women."