Kitchen Confidential

Everyone has been clamoring for photos of my new apartment but the only space that is finished is my kitchen.  I keep joking that it's really a wet bar with a full size fridge and stove. Apparently, I didn't look too closely at it when I toured the apartment because I didn't realize that it doesn't contain one single drawer.  My old apartment had tons of cabinets, so many that I would store papers and books in them.  This one barely has enough to hold all my essentials.  It's also the first space you see when you enter my apartment so I thought some TLC was in order ASAP. 

I forgot to take a full "before" photo so imagine the entire space and lower cabinets were painted white with white porcelain knobs.  There was someone living in my apartment before I moved in so there was no time to test paint colors before giving them to the painter. I just told them to paint the living room Benjamin Moore Cedar Key OC-16 and the kitchen and bathroom in White Dove OC-17.  Unfortunately, the kitchen looked kind of sad all white so I decided to paint the lower cabinet in Midnight Dream 2129-10.  I also changed out the knobs to some that I had from Anthropologie. 

The counter and stove are a warm bisque color which made the walls look too white and stark so I had the kitchen repainted in the same color as the living room.  I had thought about painting the entire kitchen dark and my friend suggested chalk board paint for the larger wall but I thought might be too much.  I also thought about leaving the upper cabinets white or painting them in Midnight Dream but in the end, I decided to paint the cabinets in the same color as the walls so they would disappear.  The invitation board with Alana Floral Vine fabric from Schumacher was my inspiration for the window treatment.

I had extra Farrow & Ball paint in Dix Blue so I decided to paint the insides of the cabinets and take off the door.  It also makes the kitchen less claustrophobic. I may think about finding a glass front door to replace it but for now it works.  It also coordinated with all of the vases that I collect in pale aqua.  I also made a Roman shade in the Alana Floral Vine fabric from Schumacher and hung my art. 

I actually made the Roman shade myself and it's not perfect but I wanted it up right away.  The candle is from the garden shop on the ground floor of Deyrolle in Paris and has seeds in the bottom to plant in it after the candle burns down.  It also weighs a ton and was probably why my suitcase was over the limit when I was returning. The egg print is from the book A Natural History of Nests and Eggs of British Birds and matches those on the larger side wall.  The sugar and creamer are from Sophie Conran.  And that lovely cord coming out of the wall is the television cable.  Gotta love quirky New York apartment issues.

Since there are no drawers in the kitchen, I was forced to get creative.  I was going to look for a wooden silverware caddy but when I was unpacking, I thought these metal lined leather pots from Sol & Luna that I bought on sale at Barneys could work and sat them out of the way on top of the stove.  It was supposed to be a stop gap measure but they look so good that I think I will keep them. I also hung artwork that my friend made for my birthday many years ago and displayed Swedish painted roosters that I bought in a Stockholm. 

So in the end, my least favorite room has become my favorite.  That's probably because it's the only space that's actually finished.  If anyone needs me today, I'll be unpacking all of my books and ordering takeout!

Is Your Kitchen Making You Fat?

I'm sure a lot of people are thinking about their diets again after consuming chips, chili, buffalo wings, and beer while watching the Super Bowl this weekend. One nutritionist recently advised her clients to "close" the kitchen after dinner which entails shutting the door and turning off the lights. Kind of hard to do if you don't have a kitchen door and even harder still if your kitchen is open to every other room in your house! I'm not really a fan of open kitchens because if you entertain, you can't close the door and hide the mess but what if seeing the kitchen all day also causes people to gain weight by always tempting them to eat. There is no "out of sight, out of mind" mentality with an open kitchen. Maybe we should be not just be designing kitchens from an aesthetic stand point but a health one as well. Just some food for thought (pun intended). What do you think?

Ruthie Sommers in House Beautiful

Aerin Lauder in Elle Decor

Frank Roop

Katie Ridder

Stella Tennant

Domino Magazine

Miles Redd

House Beautiful

Steven Gambrel

Tim and Helen Schifter

Katie Lee Joel by Nate Berkus

Nancy Bozhardt

Unknown

Steven Gambrel

Kate Spade

Kristen Buckingham in Elle Decor

Roman Williams

Jenna Lyons

Francois Halard

Steven Gambrel

Top Image: Jonathan Berger in House Beautiful

Chic City Kitchen

I was going to call this post, Chic Country Kitchen but then I remembered that the husband and wife owner's Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch don't care for the connotation that the phrase "country kitchen" infers, especially since theirs is in a loft in downtown New York. Regardless of what they call it, it's one of my favorite kitchen designs. The forced cherry blossoms add to the beautiful ambiance and have me drooling as well. I also thought that Decorno might need a little inspiration after her "home of never ending projects" post today. You can read the entire article about this chic kitchen here.

1) The island: The marble top comes from a lithographer’s studio in Indiana and had to be craned in through the window. Standefer found the tree stump in a forest, and uses it as a cheese platter or fruit stand.

2) The Garland stove: A well-used workhorse that was inherited from the loft’s previous owner, an urban pioneer who’d been there since 1968 and also kept a giant loom on the premises. She’d cloistered her kitchen in a dark corner of the loft. They moved the stove—and everything else—out into the open.

I'm going to have to do another post about the owners and their design firm Roman & Williams because they have a really interesting back story. They started out as set designers for movies and then started to get interior design jobs after a few celebs who admired their work started to hire them. There also came a point where they couldn't stand to watch all their hard work destroyed at the end of a shoot. They recently finished the lobby renovation of the Royalton Hotel in New York and word is that they have quite a few more celebrity clients. Now, I just wish they would post some photos online so we can see what else they have been up to!