Ironing boards

I have an ironing board like this. Most people do. They are big, they take up closet space, they're kind of a pain to put up and down, and they make a sound when being set up that scares the cat. Also, they can tip over, causing irons to fall on small children or set fires.

Several years ago, I lived in an apartment in Seattle where I did NOT have to have an ironing board like the one above. The apartment had an ironing board built into the kitchen wall, much like this:


The Seattle board was even better than this because the storage box was actually recessed into the wall instead of sticking out. The board flipped down out of the wall, right in the kitchen. The iron was stored right there. It was an ironing paradise.

Note that this was not a fancy new apartment. It was a studio apartment in a building so old that the kitchen had an icebox (the system by which stuff was kept cold before the invention of refrigeration.) Clearly, the ironing-board-in-the-wall idea has been around for a while. So why are we moving backward as a society?