New Kitchen: Design Comes First

This post is part one of the series "A New Kitchen for our New House," outlining the issues with our new kitchen and the initial process in creating a new, highly functional, and beautiful kitchen.

February: Coping with Subpar Existing Kitchen

In spite of the crazy 2021 housing market and thanks mainly to our timing at the holidays, we were fortunate to purchase our new house both below market and below our budget. After relocating in mid-February, we decided to use the leftover budget to redo the kitchen which was comfortably roomy but was also clumsily designed and therefore decidedly dysfunctional for a retired professional chef who cooks nearly daily.

The primary problem was lack of prep space and the crux of this problem was the island, shown in the photo below. The island surface was broken into three levels, with the range top and downdraft fan on the lowest level. Unfortunately, that left no useful counter-height space to either side of the burners.

The secondary problem was that the downdraft fan provided insufficient ventilation for any kind of cooking, let alone the high heat cooking that chefs love to employ. Downdraft exhausts are largely useless: most of the fumes still go upward, setting off the smoke detectors, and worse, the fan really and truly only serves to suck the heat off the burners.

Behind the stove rose an oddly curved two-person breakfast bar, elevated to bar-height a few inches above the cooking surface. And on the far right, a most useless granite-topped sliver of a half wall rose above both other surfaces for no good reason that I can fathom. In sum, the island had no prep space and lousy ventilation, an almost perfect exemplar of how not to design a kitchen workspace.

Existing Three-Level Island: No Ventilation and No Prep Space

After coming from a house with a wonderfully useful kitchen, we faced a bit of culture shock. During four weeks of unpacking and coping with this new kitchen, I started thinking about a new design centered on a single-level large prep island with seating for 5 people. Additionally, we walked away from the bar and wine storage that I had built in the house in McMinnville, and so I started thinking about wine storage as part and parcel of the new kitchen design. We are quite tired of living with cases of wine stacked against the family room wall, as you can see in the photo above.

March and April: Designing a New Kitchen

In mid-March, I measured the space and started sketching designs. I have designed several kitchens in the past, including consulting on a couple of restaurant kitchen designs, so this is not alien territory for me. Ann and I talked over what we wanted in a new kitchen and the design we came up with is not what we would have wanted had we been starting from a blank canvas, but it is a good compromise. The new design balances maximum utility with minimum expense in a minimal timeframe, working within the constraints of an existing footprint. By carefully managing the cost of the renovation, it will be an expense that we can recoup on sale of the house.

The design would have been very different had we the budget for new electrical, plumbing, ventilation, and relocating windows. Or the luxury of four months of construction time, four months of living in a house without a kitchen. Or the luxury of space in which to build a walk-in pantry.

During the design process, we started looking for a supplier for cabinets to flesh out the design. In fairly short order and without choosing a specific supplier, Ann selected a simple door style and came up with a general idea for finishes. At the same time, we also got a contractor on board to help with the renovation. While I can do all the work by myself, I am retired and would prefer to have someone else to handle the bulk of the labor and subcontractor wrangling. [In hind sight, I ended up doing about 80 percent of the work myself to keep us on a reasonable schedule.]

By the first of April, Ann and I had settled on a design that saw a long bar along the bare south wall of the combined open-concept kitchen and family room, perpendicular to the flow of the kitchen. In the center of the kitchen, the three-level island morphed into ninety inches of flat granite, four feet deep, seating three at the back of the island and one person along each end, for a total of five guests. Ann's island seating idea is perfect for us because our dining room table seats six, the average size of our dinners, meaning there will be five people besides the cook in the kitchen for appetizers and during final dinner prep.

The other major change was to relocate the cooktop to the exterior wall and to put in a hood with a decent exhaust fan. Good exhaust is necessary for any kitchen, especially for anyone who does sauté-heavy cooking. We chose a new range with a 22,000 BTU primary burner that will need a great exhaust fan.

There are some touches in the new design from kitchens I have designed in the past, especially the roll out drawers on the back of the island. These drawers have no doors. Trying to open doors at the prep station with messy hands has always been a losing proposition, so I eliminated the doors. And, although I have specified pull-out trashcans before in a past kitchen, I put them next to the dishwasher. The lesson learned: the prep station needs a trash can. In this new kitchen design, we had room to build twin trashcans (one trash, one recycling) right into the island where we will be working.

Kitchen Plan: Bar Left, Large Island Center

Design fleshed out and in concert with our contractor, we engaged a cabinet designer at a local big box store, after having visited and come away unimpressed by a couple of so-called cabinet specialists and their year-long delivery schedules. After an initial consultation in which we reviewed our design and requirements for cabinets, it was about a month of back and forth before we had full specifications that could go to the cabinet manufacturer.

That month was fairly frustrating in that the designer promised us schematics quickly, schematics which did not come until one of Ann, I, or the contractor rattled the designer's cage. This despite me giving him full measured drawings of the kitchen and new design. His job was basically one of transferring my design to his system and selecting the appropriate cabinets, fill strips, and mouldings from the manufacturer's catalog. We should have taken this frustration as a portentous omen.

Rendering from Family Room, Bar on Left

Cooktop Relocated to Outside Wall, Large Flat Island

Without using a custom cabinet builder, we could not get the details that we wanted for the seating side of the island, which you can see in the photo as a slab of granite cantilevered out into space. So that will become a carpentry project for me, the contractor, or the both of us. Also, Ann decided that she wanted floating open shelves on the wall to the left of the oven and refrigerator, the big bare space in the rendering above. I love doing finish carpentry so I may take on both these projects.

And that's kind of the way it works at our house. While Ann had input on the design, I handled the bulk of the kitchen logistics. And while I had some input on the finishes, it was mainly up to her as it is one of her great strengths. She could have been a great interior designer in another life and I'm excited to see her vision come to life in a few months.

For this kitchen, she has chosen a sleek contemporary look of blacks, greys, whites, brushed nickel, and brushed stainless steel. In her vision, the cabinets around the perimeter of the kitchen will be black-stained maple with white stone countertops. The island cabinetry will be grey with a black stone top. The bar cabinets will be grey with white marble-like stone and the wall cabinets will be fronted with frosted glass. The appliances and sink will be either brushed or black stainless steel. The hardware and lighting will be brushed nickel.

Finalizing the cabinet design meant that we had to choose a sink, cooktop, and hood so that we could ensure that they would fit in the cabinets. It also meant that I had to pull the face frames off the existing wall oven and microwave, which we are reusing, to measure the openings required to fit them. We'd love to get new double wall ovens, a new refrigerator, a new dishwasher, and a new microwave, but that would add a minimum of $10,000 to an already large project.

At long last, we wrote a big check and submitted the cabinet order at the end of April. Later that week, we ordered the cooktop and hood. Little did we know, this was only the beginning of a lot of drama, covered in the next post.