Cooking up some West Coast glamour in this kitchen

KELLY DECK

Clients often want us to play it safe when it comes to kitchens. A show kitchen, however, is an opportunity to (as the management consultants say) “blue-sky” it – take risks, play with new ideas and transcend limitations. My team recently got to do just that at Vancouver’s Interior Design Show West, which took place at the end of September.

Our goal with our 400-square-foot kitchen, installed on behalf of Aya Kitchens, was to demonstrate that elegance and timelessness could still crackle with vitality and unpredictability. Rather than recite old pieties about good design, we hoped to generate discussion around what makes a space unique.

The kitchen was a hit; all weekend the space hopped with curious Vancouverites asking about what we’d done. Here are fo

As we do with televisions in living rooms, we hide the fridge in nearly every kitchen we design. This time, it seems, we were especially effective. (The fridge is in the left tower of cabinetry, on the back wall.) We designed the space to have the Gaggenau appliances be inconspicuous. The fridge happens to be so well-designed – with no awkward projections of exposed vents – it became nearly invisible.

(If you’re wondering, the wall oven is below the range; the dishwasher and the wine fridge were both in the island; and a microwave, considered unnecessary in a show kitchen, was left out.)

The lone appliance we wanted to draw attention to was the range. A beautiful blend of stainless steel and wrought iron, with gold burners, it appears perfectly contextualized beneath the gold hood fan.

from theglobeandmail.com