Innovative Kitchen from Faith Sheridan Interior Design
26 August 2010
“Zen-sational”
One of the things I most enjoy about writing these blogs is the education it has given me, and this is especially true in the realm of kitchen design. Before I started blogging, my tastes in kitchens ran to pretty much the same as everyone else’s: row of base cabinets around the kitchen, and some eighteen inches above that a row of wall cabinets running around the kitchen. Been that way for years, no reason to change now, right? Well, actually, wrong. Wrong in every sense of the word, really. In order for there to be progress, there must first be an acknowledgement that what we once had may not serve as well as it did in the past.
One of the things that is particularly liberating in this regard, is to simply make an entire wall bank of cabinetry, as opposed to the traditional uppers and lowers. It can be less expensive to install such an option, because there is no countertop to take up expensive granite and the like. Actually, for those on a budget, this may be another way to afford that expens
ive granite elsewhere in the kitchen-by not putting down so many counters.
But what I really wanted to do was to look more closely at the kitchen design that Faith Sheridan came up with, because I think it is really quite extraordinary. What first caught my eye with this particular kitchen is that it occupies all of 160 square feet of space, which is about the size of the kitchen I have to contend with. And trust me, given a kitchen as small as that, one really does tend to contend with the space. Lots of the time, I think, we just give up on it. We have decided, for whatever reason, that a major remodeling that would expand the kitchen’s footprint is out of the question. What’s left is a postage stamp, so why go to the expense of an interior designer to simply change out the cabinet
ry we can change out ourselves at any big box store? And in so doing we may well deny ourselves something wonderfully innovative, which is what these Seattle-area clients got when they commissioned the services of Faith Sheridan Interior Design.
What Faith did completely revolutionized the existing space for that kitchen, starting with the monolithic wall cabinets, because they tended to, well, wall in the space! The other thing that they did in this kitchen, though, was to make it darker in the kitchen because they interfered with the back window, thereby making the yard less visible from inside the house. Because what Faith did is such a transformation, I wanted this blog’s last photograph to be a “before shot,” because it reminded me of W.L. Bateman’s saying, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.” If the new kitchen were to be different, all the thinking that went into the re-design of it had to be different, which is exactly what Faith delivered.
The first part of the solution was to simply remove the wall cabinets. Faith then replaced the two small windows with one large one that did so much to open the space. The result is night and day, both figuratively speaking and literally. Looking at something like this, you have the feeling that the first thing the clients said was something along the lines of “I feel like I can breathe in this room now,” because what Faith did with the space engenders just that kind of response, I think.
Faith calls this a Zen kitchen because, as she put it, “The clients prefer a Zen-like concept of clean lines, sleek surfaces and minimal clutter.” To achieve this, the traditional monolithic base cabinets and wall cabinets were eschewed, along with the monolithic typical refrigerator that had walled off one end of the previous countertop. Instead, all refrigeration was placed in under-counter units, making it sleek, unobtrusive, and out of the way. The typical wall cabinets-countertop-base cabinets configuration on the wall opposite the windows was replaced with a wall of cabinetry 24″ deep that collects small appliances, baking, linens and such. Pullout drawers were designed to organize recycling, tableware, glassware, cookware and spice storage. The result, as Faith rightly points out, is a Gourmet Cook’s Kitchen in hiding behind a sleek, seamless motif that really is Zen-like in its simplicity and utility.
Joseph
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5 Responses to “Innovative Kitchen from Faith Sheridan Interior Design”
August 26th, 2010 at 10:24 AM
I like the clean lines, simpler the better. Very educational article, thanks.
August 28th, 2010 at 1:54 PM
Joe, thanks for featuring the Zen kitchen I designed in Seattle, WA. You described so well the benefits of a well conceived kitchen design that takes advantage of every possible inch.
The goal for my client was to stand in one place in his kitchen and make a sandwich! We used Perlick refrigerators; 1 48″ combo freezer & refrigerator on the wall and a second refrigerator in the island. All other appliances were Miele.
August 28th, 2010 at 2:29 PM
I’m glad you liked the blog. Miele is one of the better companies around. My partner Joe Dusel has a lot of their products, and I would love to outfit a kitchen myself with them.
August 28th, 2010 at 9:47 PM
Hi Joe,
Loved the blog about our “Zen” kitchen! It’s even better in person….
September 4th, 2010 at 11:42 AM
I was only ever involved with one kitchen project with very few upper cabinets. It makes for a challenging kitchen storage-wise. The client for my kitchen project had windows everywhere! Nice job Faith!
Joe