Diane Berry

Mr and Mrs I are in their early forties and have two daughters and a son in their teens. They have an extremely successful family business and where developing a huge property on a prestigious road.

Mr and Mrs I are in their early forties and have two daughters and a son in their teens. They have an extremely successful family business and where developing a huge property on a prestigious road. Their brief was to have a show kitchen in their open plan living area that runs across the rear of their property. This kitchen was more for presenting food and making drinks (no alcohol) than actual cooking, but when needed must work as a kitchen in its own right. There was then another kitchen behind this one where their chefs would cook, this kitchen really had a lot to do as they regularly cook for their factory workers taking large curry’s in so will get used a lot. The space had been designed with lots of doors to the outside the help keep the chefs cool and room ventilated. This kitchen needed a spice cupboard, lots of pan storage along with space for big pans and when you look in from the main area must not see any mess just something pretty

As the space was tight to achieve everything I suggested adding an additional door to this room and making them both pocket doors, thus allowing the show kitchen to be easily accessed and getting better use out of this room when using the back kitchen. The Chefs now tell me how much they love how both kitchen now get used as they are able to walk either way and access the fridge and freezer in here and all the storage. The two full height dark oak doors inlaid with brass add to the luxury of the main kitchen but are very practical too.

One of my biggest challenges was the steel column that was sadly a must as this holds up the corner of the house, The kitchen position was already set and I had to consider how to make this column work, I wanted to work with dark colours on the kitchen as it needed to look luxury and not an obvious kitchen, the clients love gold so a subtle way to introduce their colour was to do a slim underframe on the island adding a more of a coachline effect and by simply stopping the upper layer on the ends created a unique feature and gave them what they hoped for a detail they have never seen before. They loved the gold so much I suggested we clad the back wall to match as it gives great contrast to the dark grey and adds the drama too.

Now back to the column, to make this disappear as much as I could I used motorised drawer units on the back so no finger rail gaps to contend with in front of the column, also extending front of drawers to the floor hiding the column from showing in the plinth. We then searched out a mirror that had a similar grey tone to the kitchen and it is amazing how in the room you simply don’t notice the column (sadly on photos it seems to stand out but honestly not in the room).

In the show kitchen I have used pocket door units to hide the ovens and the dishwasher also the centre pocket door units for drink making. The huge integrated refrigerators are carefully stocked with each area stocked carefully with various meats. This show kitchen is like hidden and sleek quite opposite to the back working kitchen. This room I reduced the height of the hob area as the chefs are all quite small so now they can easily and safely reach over their pans. We created a shallow spice store and extra large drawers for their pans, I even included tow extractors as this really can be working like a commercial kitchen.

On one visit a lady was sat on a upturned bucket next to the open double doors and was peeling a whole sack of carrots, she thanked me for such a well-designed and functioning kitchen, it amused me seeing her sat almost on the floor happy in her kitchen. I even changed the floor tiles in this kitchen to use a non-slip tile that doesn’t show the dirt as I really did want this room to simply work.

Cost of project: £123, 244.75

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