Not so long ago, an ensuite bathroom was the height of avocado-coloured sophistication — and adding a bidet the last word in continental chic. How times have changed. These days, at least one bathroom per bedroom is par for the course, and we’ve become adept at all sorts of tricks to add glamour to our homes, from creating enormous open-plan living spaces to digging out the basement or creating “garden rooms” out the back.

So, what’s next? The latest “must-have” accessory, it seems, is a second kitchen — and I don’t mean the sad little rooms you used to come across in houses carved up into bedsits, which the building society would force you to remove before granting you a mortgage.

No, any self-respecting designer home these days will have two of them. One will be a “show” kitchen on the ground floor, perhaps open-plan to the dining room, spotlessly shiny and kitted out with all the latest appliances and fanciest worktops — the kind of place the hostess can drift in and out of as she puts the finishing touches to the dinner-party canapés. The other will be hidden away below ground — infinitely less fancy, but a real working room where all the heavy-duty peeling, steaming and roasting is going on.

Over the top? Not necessarily, says Anthony Bevacqua, design director at Janine Stone, a high-end architecture and interior-design company, who regularly creates homes with more than one kitchen. He recalls a property he redesigned in the Boltons, an area in Chelsea, west London, where houses cost several million each. “The main kitchen was really smart — Bulthaup, all the units hanging on the wall, the maid constantly wiping down the cabinets because of the kids’ fingerprints,” he says. “That’s where the mother or the maid might do beans on toast for the children coming back from school, but it would never be used as the dinner-party kitchen.”

Instead, he says, there was a businesslike “catering kitchen”, with stainless-steel work surfaces and industrial-sized cookers — for use by the caterers bussed in whenever the homeowners wanted to entertain their friends. (This is the guilty secret of the top-end home with more than one kitchen: hardly anyone who owns them actually switches on the oven themselves.)

“Our clients are not the type of people who will cook for themselves,” Bevacqua says. “They are the type of people who want a trophy home — the kitchen is more a bit of sculpture than a working space.”

Blaze Stojanovski, a developer who specialises in top-end homes in southwest London, puts two kitchens into almost every house he converts. “People no longer use their kitchens just for cooking in,” he says. “They use them for multitasking — as areas to socialise and entertain — and for showing off.”

Nor is it just families who want more than one culinary space. Jeremy Pemberton, 31, director of an IT outsourcing company, paid £2.75m in February for one of Stojanovski’s houses in Fulham — which, naturally, has two kitchens. In his case, however, the second, basement one is a complement to his ‘boy’s toys’ media room next door — that is, the ideal place to keep beer.

“I’m a bachelor, so its primary function is as a fridge,” Pemberton says. “It allows for all those activities that don’t sit with your nice smart kitchen. Do I use it for cooking? I haven’t yet, but I’m sure it will be used at some point.” Apparently, it also comes in handy for hanging the laundry.

So, are second kitchens the kind of luxury confined to multimillion-pound homes — that is, for those people who can afford to get someone else to do their cooking for them?

Not necessarily. Roy and Marion Simmonds installed a second kitchen in their home in Effingham, near Leatherhead, Surrey, about four years ago for purely practical reasons. “I come from the Basque country, and in the Mediterranean lots of people have two kitchens,” Marion says. “And I cook a lot, so we decided that in one kitchen we would have an industrial gas cooker for the big cooking, and in the other a table where we can sit, talk and eat, and use it for everything. It works well, because if we have people for dinner and there’s a mess, I shut the door and nobody can see it.”

The couple, who are both in their fifties and retired, are now selling up for £950,000 (through John D Wood; 01932 864252, johndwood.co.uk ) and moving to a bungalow just down the road. Will they be putting a second kitchen into their new home? “No — it’s too small,” Marion says. “But there is a utility room, and I’m wondering what I can do in there.”

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