Renovation Spotlight: 127 Richmond Hill Road Kitchen Design
Welcome to the early of days of the renovation. Our focus is primarily in planning right now; finalizing the floor plan and the kitchen design and filing our building permit application. The focus of this post is the kitchen design. With a long lead time to get materials, working on the kitchen design early can position you well down the road. With only a few measurements needed to get started, the design work began before we even closed on the property.
The goals for this kitchen are twofold. First, we wanted to open it up to the dining area to make it feel larger and more connected to the rest of the 1st floor common areas. Second, we wanted to minimize the larger, floor to ceiling cabinets to, again, make the kitchen feel larger.
Here’s what the kitchen looked like when we bought the unit:
And here’s our design plan. First, from the Bird’s eye view:
And the elevation of the range wall cabinets:
Here’s what we did to redesign this kitchen:
To set up the room, the entrance from the hallway into the kitchen was moved to the front and the wall separating the kitchen and dining area removed.
The refrigerator was relocated to the front, left corner along the sink wall. While more expensive than freestanding refrigerators, built-in models give the kitchen a custom, high end look while reducing the protrusion of the fridge into the passageway. To achieve a fully integrated look, the kitchen design provides for 25” of depth for the refrigerator. The extra inch coupled with custom panels allows us to achieve the integrated look we wanted for this design.
In place of the wall that was removed, a peninsula was added. This gives the kitchen additional base cabinets, more prep counter space, and an informal dining space.
To save counter space, the microwave was placed into a base cabinet.
Lastly, the pantry cabinets were relocated into the dining area and reduced to 12” depth. Reducing the depth on pantry cabinets works well in certain situations as things tend to get lost in the back of a deeper cabinet anyway. We debated whether we wanted to place cabinets in the dining area, ultimately the need for food storage was too great. As an added benefit, a small counter top was added, perfect for a coffee make or toaster, to get these small appliances out of the main area of the kitchen.
Check back with us later to see how this kitchen comes to life as this renovation progresses.
Learn more about the overall renovation project of 127 Richmond Hill Road