Our apartment has a kitchen with many challenges. We have lived in the home for 12 years and every time we talked about renovating, I would just paint the cabinetry again to avoid facing the complications we knew would come. Many different incarnations swirled around in my design brain over the years and in some ways I am glad we waited so long. Nothing gives you more appreciation for how client’s feel than doing a major kitchen renovation yourself as a designer.
One wall has an old fireplace that has structural implications for the upstairs apartment. The pantry has double brick internal walls that will need to be removed to allow for updates. The floor and ceiling are concrete and cannot be tampered with.
Time to bite the bullet and get renovating. Many designs came and went and an abundance of drawings were scribbled together. I pitched the final idea to my husband who has a bigger creative mind than mine but he loved it… Phew…….
The inspiration for the design of the kitchen started with a painting by local artist Debbie Mackenzie titled ‘Buller Bound’. It wasn’t so much the colour that we wanted to replicate, more the harmony and gentleness it exuded. We have used a mix of black wood-grain cabinetry with lighter overheads to make the most of the limited south sun into the room. A subtle, shaker profile for both adds just a little more architectural interest.
I found the greige porcelain from Artedomus at the beginning of the design process and prayed that we could still source it for the splashback and benchtops. This has exceeded all expectations. My husband will sometimes find me just standing in the middle of the kitchen staring at the splashback. Floor tiles were thrown into the mix a few times, but in the end, we went with the oak timber flooring from Flooring Xtra we had laid in the rest of the home.
This renovation was challenged time and time again by COVID and took 8 months of stopping and starting. Thanks to our brilliant and patient builder Sam from Pioneering Bathroom Designs and cabinet maker extraordinaire Andrew from Alltec Joinery.
Yes, we love it and yes it was worth it.