The house was once a hunting lodge with two distinct buildings; a grand formal home and a more ‘domestic’ building to its West.
Our clients asked for a kitchen that would evoke those found in a Georgian country house of this period.
The existing room was restructured before our involvement, and a series of interior walls removed with the aim of creating a large, open plan kitchen. This made for an impressive space, but kitchens depend on walls for utilities and storage and the room created was failing to meet our client’s expectations.
Our plan instated a number of new partition walls which divided the space to create a separate breakfast and day room whilst providing the structure the kitchen required.
Glazing both sides of the cabinets above the sink connected the kitchen with the a day room and allowed conversation and light to transfer from one room to the other and in this way we maintained the spirit of the original open plan idea.
The main kitchen is supported by a back kitchen which can be deployed on big catering occasions.
The deep partition walls we added allowed for cupboarding of deceptive depth in which to secrete modern kitchen equipment such as fridges, extraction technology and a microwave oven.
By recessing this equipment into the partition walls we stopped cupboards intruding on the space and cluttering it. The depth of the new partition walls also allowed us to panel the opening between the kitchen and breakfast room, enhancing the room’s period appearance.
We designed and made every element of architectural joinery: door linings, architraves, skirting, the hierarchy of mouldings, the fibrous plaster mouldings around the ceiling and the joinery style of all the doors.
The floor in the main kitchen is French limestone, reclaimed from a bank in Provence. The central Cook’s table is traditionally made: every part of it, aside from its drawer runners and plug sockets, would be familiar to a Georgian joiner. The white marble was sourced from Italy.
A beautifully formed and entirely practical set of interconnecting spaces, married to one another through a unified approach to architectural joinery.
The kitchen and its related rooms are perfectly equipped for modern family life, but are strongly redolent of a domestic Georgian interior.