enviable kitchens

A couple of weeks ago, I got to photograph some home renovations my father designed. Some were decorated more to my style than others, but they were all really, really beautiful. (Scroll to the bottom of the post to see where I'll be living soon, once I've convinced the current owners that they have radon.)

The first kitchen looks like a House Beautiful Kitchen of the Month, or Martha Stewart's Atlanta outpost.




The second house, my favorite, has Shaker proportions and a crisp, tranquil color scheme. I would kill to make cakes on that butcher block. I would walk all around in there.





These are both renovations to older houses, 1920's and 1910's respectively. The first was a very modest brick cottage, the second, a small, charming bungalow. Both are in historic districts.

The beauty of the design is that, while these are huge and very functional spaces, the houses look nearly as they always have from the street. The extra volume was added at the back, and the rear elevations are still completely appropriate.

The moral of this story is that you don't have to live in a McMansion (or an actual mansion) to have a magazine-worthy kitchen. (But you do have to have a lot of money - I shudder at the cabinetry and appliance costs.)

These houses have probably reached the appropriate limits to their size - all the attic space has been utilized to the greatest extent possible, and the kitchens are as big as you'd want them to be. The finishes will likely be retouched and "updated" every twenty years or so, by these owners and the next. And it's likely that in this way, they'll see well over another hundred years of use.