Kitchen

What is most important to us is flow into the living area space, and flow into the area where our harvest dining table goes… all while avoiding the house feeling like a long corridor or rectangle.

We like open concept designs that let in light and are neat, tidy and organized… with clean lines & warmth. What we like about our current house is all the natural light that flows through the space, and the fact that the kitchen area (most of the house, actually) is oriented to the backyard with tremendous views of the gardens. It has windows on three sides that make it feel like a sanctuary of sorts. This gives us lots of natural light and the garden views provide a beautiful backdrop through our windows.

Ideally, the kitchen area flows into the patio area where there is a BBQ area and a seating area with no railings, and there’s a beer fridge nearby.

What we really like about our current kitchen is the size of its island (with an uninterrupted surface with no sink), and the way windows wrap around the eating nook where our harvest table goes, on three sides.

ISLAND: Our current island is 5’ x 6’6” so we are used to a large, uninterrupted work surface for our entertaining and our bigger cooking projects (pickling & canning, baking, batch cooking) with a granite surface that can take the direct heat of a hot pot, pan or roaster. Ideally, there’s an area that we can tuck backed-stools into for visiting while Sheri is cooking or doing meal prep.

CABINETRY: SLAB style… unadorned with trim or moldings, for ease of cleaning & a simple aesthetic. Our old house had deeper than normal cabinetry… perhaps we can do this again. All waist-down cabinetry needs to be soft closure drawers.

We really like the look of the floor to ceiling cupboards with no counter or backsplash or cupboards up top. In our current kitchen, the cupboards are too shallow to hold our pottery dishes up top. Floor to ceiling cupboards would make this work better for us, I think. Or deeper drawers to stack them (as they’re thick). We have a lot of large pots that could stack well in a cupboard, even though we have them currently in drawers that work well. If we have upper cabinetry, it needs to go right to the ceiling with no gap/shelf/dust collecting space.

What we’ve also noticed as a neat design trend is windows between upper cabinetry and the counter top. We quite like that, for letting light in and for growing herbs for cooking. We’ve also noticed a design trend where the window sills of regular sized windows meet the countertop with no upper cabinetry at all… again, that’s a really appealing idea.

No frosted or see-through glass door cabinets. No space above the cupboards for dust to collect. Let’s take them right to the ceiling.

No brass handles, pulls or taps. Just brushed nickel/stainless steel or black. Rectangular pulls over rounded nobs.

One other issue with our current cabinetry: where it is located near the sink, it has chipped and swollen up with water. We need really durable kitchen cupboards. We use our kitchen A LOT, doing recipe testing, canning, and cooking from home almost all the time.

One thing that has held up very well over time is the wooden cabinetry beneath our current island. In our current kitchen, it is in contrast to the outer cabinets, which are white. The rich wood of the island has held itself together, both functionally and stylistically over time. We like wood and/or stone elements integrated somehow.

We saw a slab style, cabinet, floor to ceiling, in a place that was quite shallow (6"-8” wide) that could work really well for all of our canned goods, or the lentils/flours/rices/grains/dried beans and vinegars and oils that Sheri cooks with. Things wouldn’t get buried. Failing that, a pantry cupboard with shelving in the doors that makes the shelves then shallower inside could work well… things won’t get lost in the space. Preferably, this cupboard would end at waist height and have drawers underneath. Two might work well for the volume of pantry staples we keep on hand for cooking.

No skinny pullout cupboards (Sheri sees them as a useless waste of space). In fact, no pullout cupboards at all. Visually and functionally, Sheri doesn’t like the cabinets that pull out, with shelving attached to their fronts and wire bins as shelves. The wire bins mean things fall through. And the pull out is an unnecessary expense & gadget.

DRAWERS: Slab style fronts for ease of cleaning. Drawers down low with soft closures are a must so we don’t have to bend and root around for stuff… or break the pottery as we shut them. We’d like drawers for all lower cabinetry. And some separation for pot lids in a dedicated pot drawer would be fantastic.

We have some appliances to store… food processor, cast iron roasters, crock pot, blender, hand mixers, ice cream maker….

CORNER CUPBOARD: Corner cupboards are a nuisance, and a waste of space. They need to be thought through carefully to make them functional.

COOKBOOK SHELVING: Sheri would like some area dedicated to her cookbook collection. She has tons. Perhaps built into a recessed wall space on thick wooden shelves. Sheri considers them not just a practical reference for inspiration… she sees them, as a collection with their colourful spines facing out, to be a work of art as well. Putting them on thick plank shelving, recessed into a wall, could be beautiful.

PANTRY: No walk in pantry. We prefer a wall of pantry-type shelving that is well hinged and has small storage shelving on the doors. One of the kitchen cabinets needs to be shallow (so small jars and things like spices don’t get lost) and one needs to be deep (for some of our bigger trays & pottery items & for our jars of pickles & jams). Really, Sheri is a highly organized & efficient cook, so she doesn’t really need the excessive floor footprint of a pantry room to keep clutter out of sight. And there aren’t many hand held/counter appliances in our kitchen.

SINK: We want only one sink facing a window, not on the island. It needs to have a deep, double bowl so that we can minimize the amount of water used when hand washing dishes (which we do a lot) with the small side, and a large enough area to fit pottery platters and big pots on the larger side, when hand washing. Also a darker colour to hide stains would be great (so not white, and not stainless as it scratches a lot).

GARBURATOR: A quiet garburator (positioned on the small sink side) is essential. There’s one photo here with a button beside the sink to operate the garburator, rather than a wall or under counter switch. We’d love that.

ADDING STYLE TO THE SPACE: We’d like some design feature that ties the whole area together… be it a wood ceiling and beams in the living room echoed in a lowered ceiling box feature over the table area and the island, or unique wrap around shelving, or a window sill area for growing kitchen herbs, or…. we’re open to suggestion. Also, we love the look of long rectangular cupboard or drawer pulls over knobs, or those little tab handles at the top of the drawers that are almost invisible.

ADDING LIGHT TO THE SPACE: We really, really want a lot of natural light in our home. One way to get this, and still maintain some privacy where our home sits alongside its neighbour is through the use of transom windows up above, or the windows that extend from the counter top to the base of the upper cabinetry. The counter window would be excellent for growing herbs… something Sheri loves to do with her green thumb & love of cooking from scratch. It’s also important to us, from an environmental standpoint, so that we limit the use of electric lights during the day.

FUNCTION: Above all, the space must function well for cooking.. really cooking… and entertaining. No gimicky gadgets. Just neat, orderly flow tempered with an exceptionally practical, organized sensibility.