Designers love to talk about custom kitchens. Clients love to think about having one in their home. Pinterest is flooded with kitchen ideas and the current lead time for high end appliances is higher than ever before. There must be something about custom kitchens that really changes the essence of our home, but what is the real meaning of custom and how far should we take it?
Let’s take a step back and understand why the kitchen is such a unique space in our home. For starters, it is a highly functional area that needs to meet our storage and cooking needs, not to mention our social ones. But then it’s also the place where we make the style statement of the house. If the kitchen is right, the rest of the project can succeed, but if the kitchen is wrong, boy, the project won’t stand a chance. You can ask any Real Estate broker and spot it in every HGTV show, the kitchen needs to be nailed down.
Now let’s talk about the word “custom”.
Custom cabinetry means that we’ll be able to pick the size, shape and finishes of our cabinets. But a custom kitchen is customized to the client’s ideal living and therefore it should go far beyond only custom cabinets. And don’t forget, the kitchen is ALWAYS related to one or more main spaces of the house, so a great custom design should take every adjacent space into consideration.
This is what designers often miss, and the design opportunities lost are never seen because of the norm of how a kitchen should look and the unawareness of the surrounding spaces.
Let’s take a real life example to get a bigger understanding.
We are designing a 4,300 sq. ft. house in the city of Largo, Florida. The home was built in 2013 as a high end waterfront property. The new owners reached out to us wanting to see what improvements and design elements could make the house flow better. As a first approach the kitchen didn’t seem to be an issue since it is currently a good size, open concept space. In other words, we could’ve gone with just updating the cabinetry and buying new appliances, but once we really looked into the adjacent spaces, the kitchen changed for good, and it became the ultimate open kitchen-wine cellar space.
The new space virtually connected the dining room and kitchen, and created a sequence of focal points; from the foyer to the dining room, the wine cellar, and from the wine cellar to the kitchen, the family room and the ocean. This is the kind of flow that the clients wished to have, and this is what “custom” really meant for this project.
How could it be that such a nice big house had such immense hidden potential and how did this potential become apparent?
This is what designers are supposed to do, and this is how it should go: a goal is presented, all information is collected, the problems are brought to light, ideal scenes are found or created, positive challenges are found (which are not problems but solutions towards the ideal scene), and finally a cohesive design is created. All of this in an efficient, effective and aesthetic way. These opportunities get apparent by knowingly going through every step, with the right technology and by not assuming fixed viewpoints that are applicable to other projects but inapplicable to this one.
We will continue to talk about how we do this on different scales and on every project that we have, but the important thing is to understand that custom is not the opposite to ready made, it is a unique definition and meaning for your project.
We hope you love this design as much as we love to help every unique client that comes our way.