Modern Kitchen Cabinets
11 June 2008
“When Less is More”
A dissertation on modern architecture goes beyond the scope of this site, but we really cannot discuss some of the uses for the more cutting edge cabinetry unless we at least mention what is out there in the world of the modern. The Farnsworth House looks like it was built yesterday, but it was actually built in 1951 by an architect who may well have been ahead of his time. Certainly, he was ahead of mine! All these years later I still cannot get my arms around the concept of a house without interior walls and such. But if one is to have such a thing, or even if one is simply living in a loft, more modern cabinetry that I could live with may well be just the thing.
Actually, in covering the wide world of kitchens and bathrooms and all the things that one can obtain for these two jewels of any home, we are well aware of the fact that our tastes cannot dominate the discussion. At least not to the point of excluding every idea not in keeping with our own. There are as many ways to design a kitchen as there are people to work on them, it seems. And beyond that there is any number of companies who are doing things that just blow my mind at times.
St. Charles Cabinetry in Greenwood, Mississippi is just such a company. They are justifiably proud of having been chosen for, among others, two houses that have become Twentieth Century icons, namely Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe’s Farnsworth House. One historian, Maritz Vandenburg, had this to say about the Farnsworth House:
“Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living—rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions—have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence. Mies had finally achieved a goal towards which he had been feeling his way for three decades.”
So, what kind of kitchen cabinets would you put in such a house? Certainly not the faceframe cabinets I have always favored! St. Charles Cabinetry has revived frameless, full overlay, all-metal cabinetry, and just to sweeten it up a bit, they’ve added some terrific features I can’t help wishing I’d thought of myself! If you’ve ever wrestled with the silverware drawer—and most of us have—one glance at what they came up with for theirs tells you that you’re all done with that particular problem.
And, really, that’s what separates the men from the boys when it comes to cabinetry designs: not just how the product looks, but how it performs. I’d say St. Charles Cabinetry has got that one covered!
Joseph
No comments yet