Burlington VT

You read it right: Vermont.  4 hours one way to the Boston store, and in need of help designing their Ikea kitchen, these folks reached out to me about a year ago, & we were able to help them out from here in NC.

We went through several concepts & weighed the pros & cons of each.  Then we settled on one that stole some space from an oversized existing mudroom to make a livable, practical, beautiful kitchen.

Here’s the rough floor plan we ended up with from the last concept in the table. We converted the existing mudroom into the kitchen space, & stole space from the existing deck for the new, smaller mudroom. We included an option to expand the deck in the future.

Things that were important to them:

• maximize natural lighting via South & East windows
• mud room is a must-have in the NE winters
• minimal division between kitchen & dining
• European sized refrigerator – they grow their own, eat fresh & compost, so cool storage requirements were small
• maintaining look & feel of an older home in a historic area

Before	After

Simple, elegant, functional. Love.

Yet another awesome tip from one of my clients with excellent taste. Thanks, LB!

Use toilet paper rolls to start your plants. When ready to plant, stick the whole roll in the ground. Roll will decompose

A random front door of a private residence. Nothing like a splash of red on gray.  And a couple below from the Design Exchange, which was in the original stock exchange building, a great art deco specimen with a second life.

Diagnosis

The multi-unit housing industry is suffering from Bad Kitchen Design Disease.

In older multi-unit residential developments especially. For those, I can understand small kitchens with tons of corners, dead-ends,  and appliance & cabinet doors bashing into each other. 30 years ago, most folks in a condo or apartment ordered in or went out to eat. The kitchen was just a place to keep the beer cool & the pizza hot.

So if the kitchen is supposed to be the heart & social hub of the home, then

• Why is it a design afterthought?
• Why is the one place where people spend most of their waking hours such a design headache?
• Why is better cabinet functionality ignored for the sake of granite countertops (which are highly overrated)?
• Why are there still formal dining rooms?

It’s 2012, people.

There is no excuse – particularly in new multi-unit design – for kitchens like these:

These are [somewhat] better plans because they are straight runs and have open circulation as well as being open to the living area:

Repeat after me: Corner cabinets are bad design.

You can neither reach nor see their contents. Therefore, you don’t utilize them. And they cost more to manufacture. Why pay for something that you can’t use?

The cure

Planwise, the cure for BKDD is simple: make the kitchen & living area one space. Forget the dining room. Even in single family homes, people want to merge the space. We routinely knock out plenty of walls between them.

If you want a formal dining event, go to a restaurant that provides it, & leave the linen washing & silver polishing for someone else.

What I want to know, is where are the condo & apartment developers that embrace the open plan concept?

We’re looking for collaboration project partners that get it. And if they get the open plan idea, they’ll also get our modular cabinet system with swappable doors.

We want to talk to you, space & design savvy developers.

Raleigh City Farm

Last night I went to the open house event to view the proposed layout for an urban garden here in Raleigh. There’s a nice 1 acre vacant lot that gets great sun exposure, & is central to several residential neighborhoods. The goal is to transform it into a vibrant  oasis of edible gardening in the middle of the city.

The best part about it: it’s managed. One of the hardest things to do with a volunteer community farm is maintaining it through growing seasons. People lose interest, they get busy – especially during summer months, & as with any volunteer effort, a handful of people end up doing all the work.

Having a management team handle the awareness & outreach as well as the inner workings & offerings takes a huge burden off the volunteer efforts. Kudos to the recognition that management is key.

Check out their FAQ page for all the deets on the awesome folks setting this thing up, including

• Non-profit status
• Volunteer help opportunities (digging, harvesting, working with kids, culinary expertise, awareness)
• Produce type & sale
• Location

I’m looking forward to seeing what this acre will look like in July!

Closed: toy storage! Open: Play box!

One of our clients had a small nook adjacent to their kitchen. It became a kid zone so they could keep an eye on the little ones while they made dinner & cleaned up. We built a window seat that had 2 30″ wide drawers in the base cavity for storage, and a nice thick cushion on top for a reading niche for mom.

The other day they sent me this pic of said drawers in use.

How freaking cute is that?

Goodbye Bonanza. Hello 2012.

When I first met with these folks, they said, “We don’t want our kitchen to look like it needs a wagon wheel table!” Understood. So we blew out the soffits, moved the fridge & shut down Miss Kitty’s saloon.

Before	After

Deets:

• cabinets: Ikea
• flooring: existing
• countertop: granite
• backsplash: 3×6 glass subway tile
• design: EcoMod

So there ARE Modern Kitchen Lovers out there!

I’ll forego the 1000 words. Behold.

Before	After

And a few more detail shots:

• cabinets: Ikea Abstrakt high gloss white, Nexus brown/black
• flooring: APC Cork
• countertops: quartz
• design: Eco-modernism!

Working with these folks was a total joy. They have now dethroned the previous favorite clients.

It’s not New Year’s Eve without alcohol, right?

Right.  But while you’re drinking yours  - we’re going to make ours.  Our own vanilla extract. For vanilla extract to be classified as pure, it must be a mixture of 35% alcohol and 13.35 ounces of vanilla bean per gallon. We don’t really need a gallon, though. But we also don’t want to spend $8 for two ounces of the stuff from Greedy Corporation Inc.

The Cheap Gardener and Cocktail Hacker each did some homework on it. Depending on how we crunch the numbers (and I do not love math, by the way), it comes to about 8 beans per cup of alcohol.

DIY Vanilla Extract, baby.

• Vodka? Check.
• Vanilla beans? Check. (There are a gazillion types. Happy deciding!)
• Jar? Check.

Slice vanilla beans length wise, & then into 2″ strips. Drop them in the bottle, let ‘em swim for about 8 weeks. Shake the bottle about once a week, and keep it in a cool dry place. In March we’ll have our first batch of our very own vanilla extract.

And we can top it off as we use it, & it becomes a never ending supply. One of our favorite crepe filling recipes is ricotta cheese flavored with

• vanilla extract,
• orange peel,
• dash of sugar &
• diced cucumbers. Nom.

Or, we could sacrifice a couple of beans for a Vanilla Cloud cocktail.

To 2012. Cheers.