The Well-Concealed Kitchen on Houzz!

Another ideabook by yours truly just went live on Houzz.com – ideas for cozying up your kitchen with furniture from other parts of the house! Hope on over to Houzz.com to read it:
The Well-Concealed Kitchen.

Harlem HOUZZ Tour

I don't usually post on the weekends, but I couldn't resist publishing this right away because I'm so excited! I recently wrote a quickie post on houzz.com, the site that allows you to find ideas from designers and DIY-ers all over the country. I'm so honored to share with you the wonderful story about our New York apartment (prior to our Austin move), Houzz Tour: Killy and Oliver's Hip Harlem Apartment: Color, Clever Storage and Editing Turns a Tiny Apartment Into a Gem, written beautifully by Houzz contributor Lily Gahagan.

This is by far the most in-depth look at our (beloved) former apartment, complete with small-space decorating tips and explanations of the driving forces behind our design decisions. Sending out a huge thank you to Lily and the Houzz team!

All photos by Frisson

Kitchen Redux

We've chattered on a lot about kitchens, haven't we? Oliver posted about our spice rack(s) a while back, I wrote about small kitchens that make big statements, and I've mentioned them in passing in other posts. Well, I'm bringing kitchens into the discussion again, but this time, we're talking about ours. You could say our kitchen falls into the "small" category – it's literally one strip of wall in our living room. We have 28 square inches of counter space. You read that correctly: 28 INCHES. So, don't complain to me about your ginormous country kitchen with 55 overhead cabinets and 87 base cabinets! Por ejemplo:

Dual islands, a double oven, a desk...I don't want to hear it! 
Here's what we were working with when we moved:

What's with the mirror in the kitchen, you ask? I have no idea. A generous leftover from the previous tenant. Thanks?
Despite the small size, we use our kitchen to make nearly every meal we eat (self-employed+home office+people who like to cook=lots of meals made and eaten at home). It works quite well now, but it took some work. With no where to hide pots and pans, it was pretty cluttered on top of the refrigerator for a while:

We knew we needed a pot/pan/lid solution, but unfussy, affordable wall-mounted pot racks are hard to come by! Eventually, we came to terms with the fact that we would have to make it ourselves, which is where the pegboard came in. Diamond Life allows you to specify the size you want and they cut it down. They also sell the hooks for super cheap – the whole thing cost about $30.

Before painting the board, we laid out the pot/pan configuration:

Oliver painted the board with leftover gray paint from our walls so it blends in and provides a fantastic backdrop for the luxurious Le Creuset pots and pans we were given by some extremely generous wedding guests.

We've managed to get as much stuff on to the walls as possible, since our storage space is limited and, while there's no way to hide the fact that we have a kitchen in the middle of our living room, it seems to work without being a complete eyesore.


UPDATE: My colleague Thomas was kind enough to point out my fuzzy math skills regarding our countertop space. We actually have 2.3 square feet of countertop. That's more than 28 square inches, but not exactly spacious! Regardless, my apologies for the faulty calculations. 

Cool, Compact Kitchens

As you have probably guessed by now, Oliver and I are not exactly swimming in space up here in our third-floor Manhattan ivory tower, or light orange-ish brick low-rise building, as it were. But, such is the price of living in this city, as we mentioned in a previous post (which was a little bit about how depressed we New Yorkers are...heh). Anyway, in these humble abodes/shoeboxes we call apartments, kitchens present a curious design problem. For those of us who not only lack in square footage, but also have limited budgets, cooking at home is an absolutely necessary way of life. We prepare and/or eat just about three meals a day in ours. We are both bring-lunch-to work types and we eat most dinners at home. Needless to say, we need a functional kitchen, despite the size.

Our current apartment features what I like to call an "open kitchen." Some might say it's actually a living room with one wall devoted to kitchen-ry. Details. Our last apartment had a twenty-seven square foot nook with a stove from the 1940s and an unfinished piece of plywood for the countertop. We are told that was our kitchen. And we cooked some great meals in there! So, we're not picky.

All this is to say, we love a well-laid out kitchen and I wanted to share a few favorites that are on the small side but work overtime in the style department. Some of them hardly even look like kitchens, which, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of a successful kitchen.

The kitchen that made me fall in love with Domino Magazine, and made me want a turquoise door in a navy room. I haven't achieved it yet, but there's time!

A kitchen that doesn't scream "KITCHEN" - refreshing!

Clearly, a rental. Loving the stylish use of pattern and color to mask ho-hum cabinets and a large, but generic stove.

Zexy copper pot-hanging solution.

A dresser, a sparky chandelier and a chesterfield sofa in the kitchen? LOVE.

The snakeskin backsplash with the integrated outlet cover is pure genius.

The sophisticated grey and yellow palette really ramps up the simple, clean design.

Perfection in styling.

When open shelving doesn't look cluttered.

We've already written about this one, but I'm still in awe. It was SO GHETTO before! I can't get over the transformation, so it deserves a second shout out.

Ok, so clearly a departure from the whole "small" theme, but so stunning, I had to share.

Via kitchenisms.com

Via Apartment Therapy

You can't go wrong with fine-looking x-benches in the kitchen.

Via Apartment Therapy

This is the absolutely ingenious idea of an Apartment Therapy reader. I want to steal it. Oliver is not amused; I can't get enough of hanging things from the ceiling, but he's the one who has to do the dirty work. We disagree. I win. He hangs. It always looks great. Keep your fingers crossed that I get my way on this one :)

Culinary Quandaries and Repetitious Beauty

Killy vocalized a strong distaste for our spice rack a while ago.

Well, not the rack specifically, as we'd tracked down some very lovely and inexpensive chrome wire racks when we moved into our current apartment. No, the spice containers themselves were the culprits, a cornucopian melange of colors, shapes, and sizes. We cook at home a lot, thus the orderliness of spices quickly became a source of contention. One false move with the cumin instead of the cinnamon and your Saturday morning pancake breakfast extravaganza instantly falls down several notches on the Deliciousness Scale.

Killy prefers an alphabetically arranged spice rack, of course, as any rational person would. I preferred to arrange them by overall container shape and color, resulting in five or six groups of similar spices—spice families, if you will. I memorized the overall shape and color of my favorites because, well... they are my favorites. For example, I put Red Pepper Flakes on just about everything and I know it's tall and plastic with a red label. Now, in the heat of battle with a pan of shallots and tuna steaks, the last thing I need is to get bogged down with reading twenty-nine labels (until getting to the "R's"). I thought it would be faster to look at the group (family) of five tall plastic red containers, skipping past two or three (Basil, Oregano, Ground Mustard) and quickly narrowing it down to the Red Pepper Flakes. Done and done, right?

As you might imagine, Killy was not a fan of this method. In fact, she probably skipped reading the entire paragraph above, as well it deserves. I will admit my reasoning involved a small amount of laziness, but in my defense, the discrete groups *were* nicer to look at than what I considered to be the arrangement of a demented person if you weren't close enough to read the labels (ie: alphabetical).

This is all I could find of the evidence, hidden partially (mercifully) behind our Quaaludes jar:

Killy is quite tolerant of my madness, as you can see.

Pressing on: I found out that our local grocery store West Side Market stocks spices in nice (and cheap) little glass spice bottles. After a prototype phase and Killy Certification, I picked up twenty jars of peppercorns (we go through them like crazy), dumped the contents into a large tupperware, washed the jars, removed the labels, made some new labels, and (with Killy's expert assistance) transferred the spices into their new homes and alphabetized them:

Common sense prevails once again in our very own kitchen.