Space, light and colour all play a part in making this family kitchen feel both traditional and utterly contemporary
Anyone who adds a modern extension to a period property knows they run the risk of ending up with an uneasy mishmash of styles – especially when the new room is to be a kitchen. But the owners of this Victorian house have sidestepped any such issues thanks to their decision to use traditional wooden cabinets as the basis of their design and combine these with natural materials such as marble and timber.
“The building was designed by architects, but we designed the kitchen ourselves with the help of British Standard, whose cabinets we used,” says Henry Scotland, who lives here with his wife Chloe and their family.
Measuring 12m by 4m, with 3.5m-high ceilings, the cedar-clad extension is wonderfully spacious and airy. Henry and Chloe had been worried it would feel like a corridor, so they asked the architect to design a space that was non-rectilinear, with floor-to-ceiling windows across the entire long wall facing the garden. The architect included a high-level window along the opposite wall to take the eye up to the woodland hillside.
In this bright space the couple have created a smartly multifunctional room. “The most important consideration for us when designing the kitchen space was our family,” explains Henry. “With three children under the age of 13, it had to be multifunctional, a place where they could to do their homework, where Chloe and I could relax with a coffee and newspaper, and a place where we could sit around a table and eat together or entertain our friends.”
This is just a taster, you can browse the full article with more stunning photography on pages 98-101, issue 108.
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Brief To create a family kitchen-dining room in a large new extension.
Works required Everything – the new room was a blank canvas.
Biggest challenge Preventing the kitchen from dominating the whole area, and designing a layout that would work for the whole family.
Budget Around £150,000 for the extension.
Of this, £25,000 was spent on the kitchen (cabinets, worktops, appliances, taps etc), excluding labour.
Supplier British Standard
Photography Douglas Gibb
Words Judy Diamond
