Kitchen Archives - Kelley Astore Interiors

Bespoke Kitchen Before and After

Kitchens are one of my favorite spots in the house to renovate. I always see the kitchen like the heart of a house – a place where the family gathers – a neutral ground. Having a beautiful large space to prepare and enjoy food supports a healthy relationship between cooking and eating. So I’m happy to bring you through the before and after renovation of a kitchen in Great Falls, Virginia

Getting Started

If you’ve been following our blogs for a while, you’ll know that our favorite way to go about renovations is starting completely fresh. So we gutted the entire existing kitchen, which means that everything in this renovation is completely bespoke and custom made. Looking at the raw space, you can see that it’s a fairly large space – nothing too extravagant, but also not too small by any means. The space has large windows that let in beautiful natural daylight, and I knew that I wanted this design to accentuate that. Having a completely gutted room is like having a blank canvas. The possibilities are endless and your imagination is free to run wild. Which is what we did.

Planning The Design

The first step in any design process will be planning. We knew that we wanted the kitchen to follow a neutral color palette, and we also wanted it to feature marble. Thankfully we found two different types of marble. The first one was very veiny marble that features a lot of sandy, gray, and white tones. This marble would eventually become the kitchen island. As for the rest of the countertops, we went with a more subdued marble that was less veiny. It was perfect for what we had in mind. After we chose which marble to use, we could plan the rest of the design around that.

Custom Cabinets

The first thing we tackled were the custom cabinets. We started by installing the hanging cabinets along the walls first. Afterwards we installed the lower cabinets, the kitchen island, and the pantry. All of the cabinetry had to be installed around where the kitchen appliances would eventually go. The island was built in different segments before being topped with marble. When designing the island, we made sure to build in shelves, drawers, and cupboard space for extra storage. It is so extremely important that a kitchen is designed to be practical and functional because everyone in the family spends so much time in the kitchen.

To provide contrast, we went with two different colors of paint/stain for all the custom cabinetry. For all of the cabinetry along the walls, we opted for a pale gray stain color. As previously stated, we wanted to accentuate the natural light from the window, so featuring plenty of this light color would really help brighten the room up. We decided to introduce contrast in order to balance the design. We did this by choosing a darker gray/green stain for the island. I love the way it turned out.

Lighting & Appliances

Next on our list were all the kitchen appliances. We installed the sinks, stove, oven, and other appliances. The vent-a-hood above the stove is a stainless custom design. We installed the marble backsplash and the custom-designed marble piece above the stove to offer some texture for the eye to land on. Finally, we installed beautifully polished nickel lanterns hanging over the island from Vaughan Designs. We attached polished nickel hardware to all the cabinetry, then put the bespoke custom-made barstools around the island and the design was nearly complete! All that was left to do was decorate the countertop with beautiful vintage English Ironstone pieces.

More where this came from…

I absolutely love how this design turned out and my client loved it just as much. It feels modern, clean, chic, and welcoming! If you are debating whether or not to renovate, check out our article on the perks of a kitchen renovation to help you decide!

Renovate Your Kitchen – 4 Reasons Why You Should

The kitchen is a crucially important part of your living spaces Food is a delicate form of love, making the kitchen the heart of the home. Having a beautiful large space to prepare and enjoy food supports a healthy relationship between cooking and eating. If you have children, raising them to appreciate cooking equips them with essential tools for when they step out on their own. If you’re able to renovate one thing in your house, do not neglect the kitchen. It makes all the difference. Keep reading to learn the 4 reasons why you should start renovating your kitchen today!

1. Renovation Gives You Creative Control

Gutting your current kitchen and starting from scratch allows you to build the kitchen you’ve always dreamed of. Renovation always gives you the most creative control in a design process, because it gives you a blank canvas to work on. Your imagination becomes your starting point and you can ensure that it looks and functions in a way that’s perfect for you and your family. Everyone has different needs and priorities, so customization is key. I worked with a client who wanted to do a full kitchen renovation. The original design felt outdated and seemed to suck all the natural light out of the room. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was a more clever way to use the space in a way that would brighten the whole space while providing everything the client wanted and needed from their kitchen.

2. It Makes Mealtimes Easier

Having a smart layout with a lot of storage space and counter space will make mealtimes much easier for everyone involved, especially if you’re a busy parent. Having a kitchen island large enough to have bar stools is one of the best ways to tackle this. It gives you plenty of space to prepare meals and allows your or your children to eat under supervision or while you clean. Custom-made kitchen islands are designed to your needs including size and whether you’d like it to have a sink, a dishwasher, internal storage, a stove, etc. The large amounts of additional counter space will allow the kids or your friends to get involved in cooking without the kitchen becoming too cluttered or chaotic.

For this client, we opted for a bespoke kitchen island with a beautiful marble top, built-in shelves, and amenities including a small sink, as well as four high chairs for casual mealtimes.

3. Organization Reduces Stress

Renovating your kitchen allows you to organize it in a way that works for you. Having enough storage available will largely reduce stress in a kitchen. Any successful chef will tell you that keeping a clean workspace is key to cooking delicious meals, and having smart organization makes it easy to keep things tidy. It also makes doing the dishes a lot easier. Additionally, our brains often associate clutter and anxiety together, so organizing your kitchen in a way that hides most of the kitchen clutter away gives a cleaner, more luxurious look that will ease any stress.

This was one of the priorities for this client, so we took extra care with all the built-in cabinetry. We opted for white cabinets to reflect the beautiful natural light in the kitchen, and also opted for the refrigerator and freezer to be built into cabinetry creating a cleaner look. We made sure to include a bunch of different cabinets and drawers of all different sizes to make organizing kitchen tools and crockery easier. A clean and tidy space encourages a clean and tidy mind!

4. A New Kitchen Paves the way to Post-Pandemic Parties

As more and more people get vaccinated, it feels like we’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Dinner parties, brunches, game days, and BBQs with all our family and friends are well underway, and we cannot wait! What better way to celebrate the recovery of our world than with a beautiful kitchen to prepare and host parties for your loved ones? If you’re preparing food for a large group of people, you’re going to want plenty of space to do it. Additionally, an old worn-down kitchen is not as welcoming and doesn’t feel as hygienic as a new beautifully renovated kitchen. Impress and surprise your family and friends with a new renovation.

One of the key ways to make this kitchen feel more welcoming was brightening it up. We went with a fairly neutral palette, focusing on white cabinetries, pale gray marble, and silver hardware detailing. We added lights at the top of the built-in cabinets lining the walls, as well as along the backsplash to brighten everything up. We decided to put the main sink directly in front of the window to make doing the dishes more enjoyable. To balance it out, we opted for beautiful dark hardwood floors.

Stop Putting It Off, Book Your Consultation Today!

If there’s anything we learned from this past year and a half, it’s that life is too short to put off the things that bring us joy. We’ve learned the importance of the home feeling and functioning as a safe haven, and we’ve definitely learned much joy socialization really brings. There are too many reasons to renovate your kitchen, that it would be silly to put it off any longer. It may feel like an impossibly big and daunting task, but that’s what we’re here for.

At Kelley Astore Interiors, we oversee and manage the entire renovating and decorating process. We have ongoing relationships with a range of licensed contractors and skilled craftsmen who work under our supervision on all our projects. We take full responsibility for seeing that the entire project is finished on time and on budget and that all work is of the highest quality. We take the worry out of the process for our clients. Visit our services page to get started today!