My elder sister was showing us round her new house. It is immaculate and grand, with parquet floors, acres of soft carpet and reams of pooled curtains, fringed pelmets and silk hangings. All remnants from the seller, who was clearly obsessed with soft furnishings.

Anyway, as we were all trooping round, making the right noises about the conservatory and the giant living room, our delightful border terrier cocked his leg on something silken and expensive. I quietly smacked him, then dashed into the kitchen to find a cloth before anyone noticed. (I never confessed, so let’s hope Big Sis isn’t reading this.)

Once I had calmed down about sprays of dog wee cascading over parquet and silk, I had time to saunter around the kitchen – which was a surprisingly modest affair, given the property’s otherwise luxurious scale.

“You’re going to have to do something about that kitchen, aren’t you?” I said to Sis, some time after the secret emergency had passed. “I know,” she said, sounding miserable. “It doesn’t work with the rest of the house.”

For, if your home exudes bling, your kitchen must exude even more of it. Gone are the days when a well-appointed house could get by with a glorified scullery for culinary duties. The kitchen represents the beating heart of the modern home, and “well appointed” means just one thing: its cooking area is a knockout. More than any other room, it is a permanent display case for the aspirations, style, class and – to be honest – wealth of the owner.

Ideally, your kitchen must be so glorious that it will fire up instant jealousy in anyone who comes to see it (in a nice way, of course). No wonder kitchen designers are taken more seriously (and paid more) than interior decorators. In they come, with their 3-D space-simulating computers and their swatches of stone, their ideas on peninsulas and suggestions for butcher’s blocks, stainless-steel splashbacks, butler’s sinks and all the rest. And the underlying aim of all this kit is for it to excite kitchen envy.

We all understand what kitchen envy means because we have all found ourselves at its mercy. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before “excites kitchen envy” makes its way into estate-agent speak.

One blogger, who lives on a cattle ranch in America and shares cowboy recipes with the computer-literate world, posted so many pictures of her immaculate kitchen on her site that she provoked nearly 100 responses before the site was closed to any further comment. People wrote things such as: “Swooning with jealousy. That’s the most beautiful kitchen I have ever seen.” Or “Love that you have different colours of granite. Thanks for sharing.” Or, my particular favourite, “Your kitchen is bigger than houses we’ve been looking at here in the UK” – which rolls up nation envy, property envy and kitchen envy into one giant, lip-smacking tortilla.

You see, nobody these days describes their living room, their bedroom or their study in the same saliva-drooling way as they do their kitchen. And nobody is jealous about how the furniture is arranged in a sitting room, are they? All right, bathrooms can make you a bit feverish, particularly if there is a wet room or a Claudio Silvestrin bath. But there is nothing quite like a modern kitchen for quasi-pornographic detailing.

Even my strapping personal trainer has fallen prey to kitchen porn. Responding to an innocent question about his new flat, he forgot all about torturing me on the rowing machine and instead launched into an in-depth description of the kitchen, finishing, in a hushed, reverential whisper, with the phrase “solid granite worktop”. And this from a man who can lift twice his body weight.

Almost anything can provoke kitchen envy. A clutter-free island. A steam oven. A hot tap that provides boiling water at a touch. A built-in espresso-maker. The desired accessory doesn’t need to be ultramodern – it just needs to be intriguing. When I heard about a friend of mine who had installed a rotisserie spit in a medieval chimney breast at his home in the Dordogne, it was like a knife thrust into my breast.

Why are we all suffering like this? Because the middle classes, by and large the main proponents and victims of this condition, have got rid of the staff, you see. In returning to the humble kitchen to cook our daily bread (in our Panasonic bread-makers), we have found ourselves hanging out there all the time, and so the kitchen has become a mirror of who we are. A highly codified one, but a mirror nonetheless.

“What people are actually envious of is not the kitchen itself, but the lifestyle that is displayed within that space,” says Rob Gelling, a kitchen designer who runs Bulthaup kitchens in Oxford (and who, I must confess, designed our kitchen). “People come round, they see an open-plan kitchen, and there you are, cooking at the island, facing your guests, with a sushi bar at the back, demonstrating a clean, functional, chic lifestyle. That’s what people see, more than a simple room.”

What? A sushi bar? Pick me up off the floor, I can’t bear it! How have we lived until now without one? Rob, Rob, I need you!

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