Designed for Living

Wallace’s work examines the unique and profound relationships between people and their built environments and how contemporary cultures adapt existing architecture for new uses. This existing home was beautiful but outdated, so our team took it right down to the studs. The kitchen, in particular, felt tired and out of place, so the process we went through focused on infusing a contemporary way of life into the old home. We wanted to ensure we would still celebrate what makes this historic home so lovely, while considering how the family that owns it lives today.

Regarding kitchen architecture, the special thing about cooking is that it’s so different for everyone, and it often changes as a family evolves. In one design iteration, you are planning for a couple before they have kids, which is very different from how you design for them after they have kids or when their kids get older and, ultimately, when they become empty nesters.

The first thing we want to do is understand where our clients are in their lives and how it will change in the foreseeable future. Then, of course, we want to balance that with what type of people they are. Some clients keep things very clean, while others are messy when they cook, so they would not want an open-concept kitchen with nowhere to hide things. In kitchen design, we ensure our work reflects an understanding of those two aspects of our clients’ lifestyles.

For this family and this townhome, obviously, the kitchen is quite open to the living space and the dining room beyond. They wanted to be able to seamlessly move from the kitchen to the other spaces on that floor. 

Our biggest challenge in this house was that the front was tight, and there was no room for a grand vestibule or a center hall upon entry. We also wanted full-width windows in the back of the house to look out to the garden and the garage. There wasn’t enough room on the narrow ground floor for a mudroom, and if you did have one, you wouldn’t get a generous living room overlooking the back with the beautiful southern light.

PHOTO BY RILEY SNELLING
Stacking the living and family rooms at the rear of the home with terraced landscaping maximizes light and access to the backyard within the narrow footprint.

We tried hard to look at this small floor plan and find a way to create an incredibly elegant, family-oriented ground-floor space that visually extends into the back garden. So, the biggest thing in this house was identifying the front as the dining room, because it’s casual and easy, and it also allows you to put the main living space, the main living room area, against the back glass—which is super lovely both day and night.

It is a wonderful space to be in, and what it means is that the couple can be making breakfast or dinner while you have kids sitting at a table or guests in the living room, creating the feeling that the kitchen is the center of the home. Thankfully, we had just enough room to do it width-wise.

We came up with that strategy in response to the clients saying, “We’ve got young girls, so we want to be able to cook and help them with homework.” They needed the kitchen to handle these tasks at once, but as the girls get older, or if they are asleep, they still want to be able to entertain their friends at the dining table and in the living room right next to the kitchen.

We knew we’d have natural light at the front of the house and tons of light coming from the back, but we worried the kitchen in the middle would feel too dark, so we thought it would be lovely to bring natural light into the sink area. So, we designed functional pantries on either side, with suspended cabinets made from translucent glass in front of a huge new window on the side of the home. It was our way of demasking the kitchen. Typically, upper cabinets and backsplashes are quite heavy, so we went through the effort of installing these glass-backed cabinets with glass fluted fronts to make them delicate and elegant. At night, they shimmer, and in the daytime, the space is illuminated.

For the Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances, we chose to place them behind integrated panels. If you have an enormous rural kitchen, you can highlight a large range in the center of the space, but for a smaller footprint with a contemporary style, it is essential to make the appliances appear more seamless.

That’s the wonderful part about the Sub-Zero, Wolf, and Cove product line. It offers both this robust industrial aesthetic and the ability to tuck everything away with fully integrated ovens, etc. The products disappear or feel like furniture, and that is a successful narrative about how kitchens can become integrated into the main spaces, which, in small floor plans, can be hard to get right.

In terms of the color scheme, we leaned into the homey nostalgia of English country homes. The client used to ride horses and had a healthy nostalgia for London living, so we opted for hunter greens, soft whites, and some deep leather furnishings. It was an excellent exercise for us, and we managed to avoid the floral wallpapers and more fussy aspects of that aesthetic. Instead, it became a successful juxtaposition between the traditional and something a bit tidier and more sophisticated.

Making these design decisions thoughtfully allowed our team to successfully blend the home’s historic provenance with the clients’ modern lifestyle, adding light, flow, and a sense of ease.