Kansas City Kitchen Redesign

The client came to us for a consultation on their home. They felt there were multiple issue’s they were trying to address. The kitchen was their main concern along with updating the interior of the entire main level.

After walking through the space, the first thing we needed to tackle was the traffic pattern from the garage to the kitchen. The door to the garage was in a very congested area, the minute you set foot in the door there was a powder room to the right and the laundry room door to the left and the kitchen had two entrances, one directly in front of the garage door and one off the same hallway leading to the dinning room.  The laundry had been moved prior to this visit, which left a catch all room adjacent to the powder room.  The beginning of the solution was to close off the garage door from the small congested entrance and move it into the catch all/ ex-laundry space, by doing this, traffic is directed through the unused ex-laundry space to create a drop zone for coats, shoes, cell phone’s, purse’s etc.  This also relieves the hall space of one entrance and a door swinging into the middle of it to decongest that space.  We shut off one of the entrances to the kitchen and widened the other, this allowed us to again divert traffic and create an uninterrupted work space for the cook in the kitchen.

The client also felt the space in the house was not proportioned from room to room to maximize today’s progressive lifestyle. The dinning room is too small, the living room was too big and the hearth off the kitchen space (which was used the most) was cramped from the small table in the kitchen.  We decided to exchange the living/ piano room into a very large family style dinning room and the old dinning room into the piano room. With two more issue’s out of the way we go back to the kitchen to address the last request.

When planning the kitchen, the hood over the pro cook top was the likely candidate to become the focal point, so we removed the kitchen sink window (since we already had an abundance of natural light) to take advantage of our dominate wall. We then introduced the furniture-like island to harbor the single bowl apron sink, the dishwasher, provide a ton of prep area and bar seating.  The solution for the table was to integrate it into the island and delete a traffic pattern on one side of the table. The oven cabinet was set into the wall with the plaster retuning into it to give it a European feel and pocket doors to cover the ovens to conceal them when they were not in use. The pantry and refrigerator/ wine/ freezer where decked out in a distressed armoire furniture look to maintain the euro/country feel and we put the final touches to the space with distressed hand hewn beams, textured and glazed walls and a hand painted backsplash with glass accents.