To the kitchen!

I walked past a board advertising a new housing development and it boasted that the new flats would have integrated appliances to kitchen. This, I felt, is a nice example of Estate Agentese, a minority variety of English with a few unusual distinctive features. This variety seems to be acquired in adulthood, rather than as a native variety, when one becomes an estate agent and acquires the norms of the community. As such, it's likely to exhibit a lot of variation.

It's characterised by unnecessary verbosity, but at the same time greater levels of omission than are usual in standard English. So here, we have a redundant specification that the appliances are in the kitchen (where else would they be in a small flat without a utility room?), and a bare definite noun with no determiner (to kitchen rather than to the kitchen), which is also a feature of headlinese and other reduced written registers. We might also find high register vocabulary: they talk of aspect and premises and being well-appointed.

It was the choice of preposition that caught my eye here, though. This is a curious feature of this variety. Which preposition you use in any given sentence is notoriously difficult. You can rationalise all you like about the meaning of the word, but it is still a bit random at times. It's totally normal, for instance, to mention the dangerous creature either to your left or on your left. However, in standard English, you would expect a description of where the appliances are to be in the kitchen, not to the kitchen, which we would associate more with direction of movement. This might be a generalisation of its use in phrases like to the rear of the house. Or maybe it's an extension of the verb form of integrate, where you might integrate the appliances into the kitchen.

If you're a speaker of this variety of English, do chip in with your thoughts!