New kitchen tour

Storage is my love language

A few days ago we had the final walkthrough meeting with Jackson, the team who created our new kitchen, so I think we can safely say that our new kitchen is done. We’ve been cooking in it for about six months now (those final details that have no bearing on the day-to-day functioning of a space take a long time to wrap up). I think we’re ready for the tour.

This is the view of the kitchen from the living/dining room. In the original sketch, the display shelves in the kitchen island had pretty pieces of art and just a couple of books. I’ve filled up both shelves with books and recipe folders and I’ve run out of room. Still trying to figure out where my other cooking books should live.

The other side of the kitchen. Magnets don’t stick to the new fridge so the handful of things that are on there are stuck on with blu tac. On either side of the fridge are the pantries, each with five pull-out drawers. Big fan.

I’m just putting this here because I love my tea towels. Tilly is learning how to read now and the other day she read aloud ‘It’s like my kids don’t even know I’m a good parent’ and I just smiled and nodded because I didn’t know how to explain humour and sarcasm to her.

The wooden furniture piece is the island from our old kitchen, which we love and wanted to keep. Our instruction to the designer was that we don’t care how you incorporate this, because we know it doesn’t quite fit the vision board, but it’s staying. The artwork above the old island is by my friend Ellie, whom I met when we were both working at the University of Southampton. She left academia for a career as an artist and I commissioned her to paint my local Waitrose in Southampton, which was (and still is) one of my favourite supermarkets.

Also I love our fruit bowl but the amount of fruit we have never fits in it properly and there’s always fruit overflow. Function over form is kind of a theme in the kitchen.

Speaking of function over form, there was a fair bit of convincing I had to do (of my husband) that we should have hooks at the end of the island. Yes, it (kind of) ruins the beautiful waterfall and clean design look of the island. But where else are you going to hang the cloth that we use multiple times every day to wipe up the table and island and bench?! What about the tea towels?! I don’t want them laying around in damp clumps! At least they’re nice looking hooks.

My favourite part of the entire kitchen. A big, deep drawer that fits all the things that previously were shoved in random corners and on top of other things and were difficult and awkward to get out and use. Three different sets of mixing bowls, a salad spinner, two sets of measuring jugs, a couple of sieves, a collapsible colander. Everything that didn’t have a great home before is now wonderfully, delightfully accessible. I use bowls with abandon now and it’s GREAT.

My second favourite part of the kitchen, and for a very similar reason. Everything that used to be awkwardly stacked and stashed and hard to get out is now organised and so easy to get out.

While I’m on the topic of storage, this corner cupboard has the lazy Susan and those two spinning shelves are where I keep a lot of our food storage containers.

This hanging cast iron display is another favourite. We have a lot of cast iron pans (this isn’t the full collection; we have four other pans and two Dutch ovens stored in a drawer under the stove and in the old wooden island), and this was a way of storing them without having them taking up even more drawer/cupboard space. The project manager and I spent ages mapping out, on cardboard, where the hooks should go to best fit the pans.

In our old kitchen, our utensils lived in a crock on the benchtop/counter, next to the stove. Our knives hung on a magnetic strip above the main food prep area. I was reluctant to move those things because I was worried about the actual use of the kitchen and whether having them in a drawer would make it harder to cook. I won’t say that I’m a convert to this but I will say that it hasn’t been as bad as I feared and I will concede that this looks way nicer than the old way.

We chose not to get the angled risers to display our spices nicely. The jars are in alphabetical order and it looked nicer until I bought spices in larger quantities from Penzey’s. I’m yet to figure out a better solution that both keeps all the spices in the same place AND doesn’t require me to decant them into jars. This works for now.

More things that used to live on the bench/counter and then got moved into a cupboard because of the look — oils, and salt and pepper. Again, I was worried about the functional aspect of having the oil put away, but it hasn’t been so bad. Especially after I moved it to this skinny upper cupboard next to the stove (it used to be in the pantry on the other side of the island and that was just annoying). The butter bell, bread bin, and toaster oven remain on the bench/counter. I’m unlikely to have a kitchen that is completely free of anything on the counter, the way you would see in a magazine. But I’m okay with that.

I remember in one of our very early design meetings, I told the team that I don’t think I like cooking but I do it all the time because I like eating. Jim, the lead architect on the project, said that’s just because I didn’t love the kitchen I was cooking in, and when I had a new kitchen then I’d enjoy cooking. I didn’t entirely believe him — cooking in a bigger kitchen is still cooking. I still have to plan everything, prep everything, cook everything, and clean everything. A change in kitchen doesn’t change any of that. But six months into using this kitchen, I think he was right. I do enjoy cooking a lot more now.