Before renovating your kitchen, ask: What would Julia Child do?

For decades, Julia Child’s kitchen in Cambridge, Mass., served as her headquarters: a place to cook and to develop recipes, of course, but also where she filmed three of her now classic cooking shows.

The chef, cookbook author and ebullient television personality, who died in 2004, made it her life’s mission to help people become comfortable with — and even savor — cooking. (The modern day Instagram influencers who film from their kitchen owe a debt of gratitude to this pioneer of the genre.) As you’d expect of any culinary mastermind, Julia and her husband, Paul, were intentional about how best to set up the all-important space when they moved to the home in 1961.

“They wanted to really make sure that it reflected the way she cooked, the way they lived,” says Paula J. Johnson, curator of food history at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “I mean, she practically lived in the kitchen. So it had to be comfortable. It had to be functional. … It is a serious working space, obviously, but it’s deceptive because it feels so homey.”

Johnson knows a thing or two about the hows and whys of Julia’s kitchen. She was one of the people who called Julia in 2001, when she heard the famous home cook was decamping for California, to inquire about the plans for the kitchen. Julia agreed to donate it to the Smithsonian. Johnson helped direct the massive undertaking of documenting the more than 1,200 tools and objects, transporting them to D.C. and then reassembling the entire room exactly as it was in Cambridge.

Since the opening of the exhibit in 2002, which Julia attended, the museum estimates that millions of visitors have seen the kitchen. These days, it’s prominently displayed on the first floor, and guests can walk all the way around it, peering into the room from every vantage point. With the October publication of her new book “Julia Child’s Kitchen: The Design, Tools, Stories, and Legacy of an Iconic Space,” Johnson is giving readers even more insight into the kitchen and the many items it holds.

I recently had the chance to walk around the seminal space with Johnson, and she shared what she learned about the kitchen — and how people can incorporate Julia’s design philosophies into their own hearths.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, at home gatherings, people tend to cluster in the kitchen. This fact predates Julia, but she ensured that her space could easily accommodate this very human inclination. In fact, she wanted her guests to feel comfortable and invited there.

Not everyone relishes the idea of guests crowding around while they’re cooking. But if you accept that it will happen, you can play sheepdog yourself and herd the inevitable flock of guests into an area that won’t get in the way of your work.

“Having the table smack-dab in the middle of the kitchen is just Julia,” Johnson says. It’s dressed up with a bright yellow tablecloth and a white braided ceramic bowl the Childs bought in Marseille, France. The bowl, among Julia’s favorite items in the kitchen, per Johnson, frequently held bananas, Paul’s favorite breakfast. (The exhibit includes fake bananas in the bowl, but the fruit is one of the very few substitutes in the space.)

Alex Prud’homme, Julia’s grandnephew, told Johnson that the kitchen table was utilitarian but also the “center of the universe.” He remembered all of the items splayed on top, like newspapers, cookies and tea. “It was magnetic in a sense.”

Viewers of the show might not recognize the table, because a kitchen island replaced it during filming. After all, for Julia, the idea of entertaining in the kitchen had a dual meaning: She was regularly hosting television viewers in addition to intimate gatherings of friends and family. But the majority of us probably won’t need to install a metal pole on the ceiling, as Julia did in the 1990s to accommodate television lighting.

The kitchen’s design was a true collaboration between Julia and Paul Child as they worked to create a space that made sense for how Julia interacted with her tools. The two laid out the kitchen based on work zones — the sink, the famous Garland range and the fridge. Then, she grouped the tools likely to be used in each area and distributed them in the correct zone.

“You just look at all of these implements and they’re at hand,” Johnson says.

One of the kitchen’s most noticeable elements is the famed pegboard filled with copper cookware, cast iron and other kitchen equipment. It is both functional — making it easy for Julia to find and use items — and decorative, because “we rejoice in the shapes of tools,” she said, according to the book.

“I have always been a hanger-upper, since I like to see where everything is,” Julia said, adding a word of warning: “But one must make a careful plan for this kind of arrangement, or the kitchen will look like a junk shop.”

The Childs plotted where on the kitchen’s many pegboards each pot or pan would go, and Paul even outlined their shapes so it would be easy to return each to its rightful place. The resulting look signals this is a bustling — but not messy — space.

However, don’t turn to Julia for advice about culling kitchen tools and utensils. That was not something she did very successfully, she said in 1976, as quoted in Johnson’s book: “I have almost come to the point where any further acquisition must mean the getting rid of an existing object, and that is a terrible wrench because I love almost every piece. I therefore have no helpful advice to give those with limited space, except to suggest puritan restraint, strict discipline and super organization.”