Shiny and New: Making over a Webster Groves Kitchen

We rewatched Mad Max:Fury Road over the weekend (I love it as much the second time around). If you know the movie, then you know the chrome aerosol cans used by the War Boys as they ride into their final moments on their way to the gates of Valhalla wanting to be “shiny and chrome”. The more Chrome the more Glorious. It’s a cool visual. Anyway, sitting down to write this blog, the phrase “shiny and chrome” popped into my head. This kitchen isn’t made of chrome but it is shiny and new and full of glorious bling.

We worked with our amazing clients remotely as they just purchsed this house in Webster Groves and were still living on the East Coast. We worked on the design scope before they moved to St. Louis and spent time back and forth on calls, emails and facetime. The original kitchen was dated and had too many different levels and corners. The wall of pantry around the fridge stepped back to three different planes, the peninsula had two levels, the range was under the window. Too much going on for both our and the client’s desires. We all agreed on making things more linear and cohesive. The clients were fine with the general L shape layout but wanted it to make more sense. The first step was the center the range between the two back wall kitchen windows and add a hood. The next step was to even out all of the pantry cabinets around the fridge and to bring that back on a return to give them an L shape wall of built ins. Their existing pantry was a walk in closet pantry with very shallow shelves and wasted open space. We decided to nix this and replace with built ins- making everything more accessible. We did brick up one window to give them open shelving, but we added lighting and kept the upper half of the kitchen bright white which upped the light in the kitchen ten fold. Black herringbone 12x24 floor tile and Inkwell black on the perimeter base cabinets grounded the kitchen and brought a nice high contrast. Brass hardware and lighting made for some nice kitchen jewelry making it shiny and new!

You can see the before, the design process and the after below.