No one has ever said you have to be a nuclear physicist to design a kitchen—but there are times when it might help. Take, for example, the kitchen of John and Peggy Lehman in suburban Chicago. When they designed their new home, they put the kitchen at the center of their plan, with most of the public rooms in the house orbiting around it.

“We chose to design the kitchen as the nucleus of the whole house,” says John, “because we wanted so many things to be accessed from the kitchen. We found in past homes that everyone tended to gravitate to the kitchen—not only us, but any kids or guests who were around.” So making the kitchen the most important room in the house didn’t exactly take a quantum leap of logic.

The couple discussed this at length with architect Phil Liederbach, and together they came up with a workable, albeit tricky, solution: Make the kitchen an inside room, which meant no direct openings to the outdoors. However, by placing the kitchen in a central location, they were able to make connections by spinning off rooms in every direction. Radiating from this central core is the family room, the dining room, the breakfast room, a gallery, a home office, and a rear terrace. Of course, that left one looming issue to deal with: How do you bring natural light into a room that has no windows or doors to the outside?

Here, too, a little bit of physics went a long way. Liederbach laid out the kitchen so that light from the adjacent spaces could reach directly into the inner core of the house. In some cases this was just a matter of lining up kitchen doorways with outer doors and windows. For example, a double-wide opening into the kitchen lines up with a wall of French doors in the breakfast room. In addition, an equal-sized opening on the opposite wall lines up with French doors in the gallery, and a single doorway lines up with a single door and large window beyond in the office. But even these clever arrangements didn’t bring in enough natural light. So Lieder bach also designed cabinets with glass doors on both sides and a pass-through, allowing light to pour through what would typically be a solid piece. He also designed an interior window above the sink that lines up with a glass door in the gallery between the breakfast and family rooms, providing not only light but a view of the backyard.