Thursday, February 26, 2009

Kitchens: Part One



Enough about metaphors. I promised that this blog would be fun and what is more fun that a series of painterly kitchens, the hearth of every home. The two photographs above are courtesy of oldhouseweb.com. The left one is renovation of an old Eichler kitchen by Timeline Construction in California and the one on the right is a condo renovation by XTC Design, Inc. in Ontario, Canada. The black and white check flooring pattern is actually a very classic combination in conjunction with bold colors. It serves as a bit of a visual break to the colors, but are strong colors pattens in themselves that holds up to vivid color selections. I love tile backsplashes because I am an artist as well. I love their design flexibility and the fact that they are easy to clean. Above you can see how the individual designers were able to push the tile patterns to the limit by making very individualized artistic statements.

The lower three images are my own humble IKEA kitchen in my 2-bedroom rental. I used to live in this unit with dilapidated kitchen cabinets from a century ago which had been moved from room to room looking for a home. The only beings who were happy with the arrangement were the spiders who chose to make their nests there, so they had to go. This design was an exercise in how you could push the cheapest of all cabinets and add paint and a floating countertop to achieve a not so inexpensive look. The design was actually a collaboration between my contractor, my tenants and myself. Most of the time I acted as the mediator putting arguments to rest as opposed to being head designer.

IKEA cabinets have come a long way since I put up my first IKEA kitchen, a wonderful orange beech concoction with pinkish and beige tile backsplash and a black laminate countertop shaped like an automotive dashboard. That is still one of my favorite kitchens, but back them, the cabinet boxes came only in white and they fell apart as I tried to pull them out of their packaging. Now IKEA also offers birch boxes which is ideal but only if you wish to use birch fronts for a more uniform look. So I used birch in my 2-bedroom kitchen which immediately brightens up a dark space.

As my contractor and I pored through the IKEA catalog, we discovered that the company manufactured
4'x8' panels finished in wood, aluminum, and colorful laminates. So immediately we took to a strategy that used all of these materials. We covered a whole brick wall with butt-jointed birch panels which gave the kitchen a continuous feel. We added red cabninets and a red side panel. Other innovations include a turned-around upper shelf that we placed below the floating laminate countertop to give the apartment unit storage space which it lacked. We backed it with an aluminum panel. The backsplash was originally intended to be a red subway tile, but I ran out of money. My tenants saw the remnant piece of red laminate backsplash and suggested that we use that. It was great cost-saving idea both because I didn't have to buy any more material and also because installing a panel is much less time consuming and labor-intensive than a tile backsplash. Plus the lacquered laminate is very easy to clean.

My tenants chose an apple green paint to complement the red and birch. I used a subtly patterned black laminate for the countertop because a stone countertop was out of the question. Too expensive. And also, stone may have been too hard and harsh a material for what had emerged as a very plastic-looking design. I couldn't afford to put in French doors leading to the exterior deck. That would have been ideal because it would have allow light into a dark space. But when it came time to choose the color for the door, I of course said "RED."

All in all, it was a great exercise in pushing a new, more collaborative way of working, cheap kitchen cabinets and paint to its limit. It was rewarding in that when I did acquire an old Woolworth's building turned apartment complex in the Berkshires, the community developer offered me funds to implement the same design ideas in order to attract a more sophisticated crowd to the area. It was a gratifying gesture that didn't pan out because of the economy and other things, but hey, that is another story.




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