Steve Holman Studios Kitchen Design
10 December 2008
“Find a Wheel”
Last week I introduced you to Steve Holman who is a furniture maker who has a shop in Vermont, and those who read that blog probably had the idea that Mr. Holman could pretty much keep on making things forevermore and never do the same thing twice unless he had a client who specifically requested it. I certainly got that idea, but then I spent a lot of time on his website feeling like a kid with his nose pressed up against the window glass of a toy store at Christmas time.
The man’s woodworking skills are manifest in everything he makes, but what most impresses m
e is his designs because of the difficulty of the challenge. The goal is to make something different, but always remembering that what one makes must be functional, so you can’t just sit down at a drawing board and begin making freeform sculptures. Everything you do, if you’re designing a kitchen, is eventually going to have to be used by a cook who is not going to be amused by having to reach under or around your clever added piece to a drawer front that makes it difficult to open the drawer. For some of us, kitchens are to design. For everyone else, kitchens are to use, and when kitchen designers forget that, they make something, well, unusable. That said, though, it is such a drag to design the same damned thing everyone else has. And with that we can discuss the kitchen Mr. Holman designed for his sister.
Regular readers of this site know all about my fascination with European style kitchens. In fact one European reader wrote to ask why an American cabinetmaker would write about those kitchens, as opposed to the glorious wooden kitchens she was expecting. The reason is that the lion’s share of what I see is pretty much what I have already seen, and what I am most hoping to accomplish is to do something other people haven’t done. Of course, looking at something like the kitchen in these pictures just slaps the bejabbers out of my psyche, but that’s the price I pay for writing these blogs, I guess.
I think what most impresses me about this kitchen is the use of circles in a wooden kitchen. I have seen the rounded ends and corners in any number of European kitchens, but these are normally done with Medium Density Fiberboard, because it can so easily be bent in a factory. It is then covered with a plastic laminate of some sort. I believe the end result is stunning, which is why I’ve written so many blogs about those designs, but I often find myself wondering if a person with imagination could do something like that in wood. Well, I have my answer now.
The other thing that particularly impresses me about this kitchen is the way it has been integrated into the room in which it resides. Looking at it, one is not at all sure if the kitchen was designed and then the room was built around it, or if the room was always there, and a kitchen designer—Mr. Holman—exploited the space with his glorious kitchen design. Either way, it is that most perfect of designs, something that is both different and practical, because it is at once apparent that the cooks move around this kitchen with the greatest of ease. And, finally, I do have to point out the repeating theme of the circle, ending with a chopping block that is both unique and imminently practical. Not a wheel, exactly, but it goes round, round, round.
Joseph
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