Blogmas Day 1

 

Welcome to first of 12 (ish?) micro blogs to carry us into the new year. Bite sized portions of what this year has been like and where the next year will take us.

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Laying out major life changes in a semi-public forum can be daunting at times. I try to write honestly about the troubles we face or the choices we're making and that's done with the knowledge that I will rarely be able to have a back and forth discussion with the reader and whatever impression is made will inevitably be out of my hands. Given this, the pull to be defensive of one's choices or over explain the rationale can be overwhelming. The tone of the blog (a bit bombastic, at times hyperbolic, and maybe even confrontational towards a would-be strawman reader) is often my way of powering through these concerns and achieving enough escape velocity to hit publish.  

That's on my mind right now as I prepare this week to discuss some of the design and color choices we're envisioning rather than just the build projects we're accomplishing. The expression of personal taste into a low-context vacuum is rife for misunderstanding or even revulsion. One of my favorite threads on Twitter this year yielded this insightful anecdote:

With that said, here's where our minds are.

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The interior walls of the house were starkly white upon arrival and worse they were actually 3-4 different shades of white spread room to room, including a green tinted white in the front room that adds a sickliness to the proceedings.

It's been de rigueur for homes to aspire to a white, scandi aesthetic for the better part of two decades now. And like all style trends it appeared first as a cutting edge top-tier design movement, then trickled down via mass market availability to suburban homes, and finally as a bottom-barrel, copy-paste, until all commercial spaces are grim reflections of an over-capitalized trend (looking at you Air BnBs that are dressed the same all over the world)

Our house is not this kind of white-all-over look though. Ours is the look of a house that clearly had some color and pizzazz and identity in the 60s and 70s and as these looks aged out, the homeowners' response was to paint it white and not worry about it ever again. Here's a look at the current wallpaper in the bathroom and the actually fun wallpaper we found underneath. 

This house had its fun and style slowly drained from it or covered up completely. On to the kitchen.

You can immediately see this lack of life in the kitchen. The ceiling is the same cool mid century plank wood ceiling found throughout the entire front of house. But like everywhere else, they painted the walls white, right up to the ceiling. That tone of wood DOES NOT match white. And if you have a fantastic original wood feature like this, you match the walls to it, not the other way round.

Also, by having all white walls in this mostly open concept space (it's a big donut with a brick fireplace/pillar to the ceiling at the center) there's absolutely no definition to any of the rooms. Those kitchen cabinets look like they're floating in space, rather than serving as part of a room. 

We also know that we're not "renovating" the kitchen. All the cabinets are solid wood and in decent shape. All the appliances function within acceptable parameters. We have enough cork flooring to bring throughout the kitchen but only once the back of the house in complete. We're freshening up the kitchen with a deep clean, new hardware (TBD), some sanding/shaping of the cabinet doors, and painting. Here are some design kitchens that have aspects of the look we're hoping to acheive.

Pretty quickly we locked into the idea of using two colors to define the upper and lowers. Many of these designs are using saturated blues and green (heavier colors) on the bottom cabinets to accomplish this while either using natural wood tones, lighter colors, or open space above.

While there's some interpretation as to what constitutes a mid-century color palette, a variety of naturalistic greens can be used in contrast to wood tones or those saturated blues. Of note: we really hate open shelving.

A couple of these are using just the counter top or the island as the heavy color and then use the lighter color around it. While nice, this doesn't align with our kitchen layout. One element we particularly liked is that of a gallery shelf (kitchen 2, 5, and 7). It isn't open shelving as much as it's a shelf for decor or more semi-permanent kitchen implements. We most likely will replace the current odd, glass case on the kitchen wall (see above) with some sort of shelving piece that only goes half way up the cabinet

This last image came up pretty late in our search and, for me, really codified what I wanted from the space. It has the interplay between a heavier and lighter color, it has a bit of a gallery shelf, but most strikingly, it isn't using the upper or lower cabinets as the default start/stop for the color transition. So much of the weakness of the current space is that disconnect between the "kitchen" items and the non-kitchen walls. The height of the walls plays into this a bit. Seeing this yellow block cut across the door on the right of the image gave us the idea to use the gallery shelf as the transition point for the colors instead of the cabinets. Beyond leaning into some very mid century color concepts such as the works of Mark Rothko, this also embeds the color identities of the cabinets into the walls, which will better define the kitchen's spatial identity. I've done a crude mock up.

So we're planning on a saturated, almost matte blue for the bottom color and then a light pink (not quite dusty rose) for the upper color band; this will split the upper cabinets about half way up. This is very close to the color scheme in the 6th picture above. We're going to continue the pink right up to the natural wood ceiling which will again help define this entire space as the kitchen. And yes we're going to do it to the other kitchen wall, I was just too lazy for a second mock up. And if we don't like it, it's just paint.

This is currently on our calendar as the January project but I suspect that the wood restoring will take some extra time, so maybe this stretches into February. Definitely a project for when working outside is ill-advised.

-S.