Awards & Press - Kitchens, Bedrooms & Bathrooms

BRING ME SUNSHINE

Glossy yellow units add warmth to this kitchen, but it's the details of the design and comfort that make it so successful.

Bringing sunshine into a lower ground floor room can make all the difference to its feel, as anyone who has lived with one can confirm. So, when Pimlico resident Jane Carlyle-Scott began converting her less-than-inviting basement from a spare bedroom into a kitchen and dining room, she not only chose to enlarge the windows, but to warm up the room from the inside too.

Hence her choice of colour for the kitchen units, a high-gloss lacquer in warm, sunny yellow. "Scrambled egg" and "custard" are two terms Jane uses to describe this shade, adding that she looked at the possibility of a warm wood kitchen before settling on the current look. At the suggestion of her interior designer, Jane worked withGraeme Freedman at Crabtree Kitchens to find just what she was looking for. "I really liked the shiny white lacquer that's around at the moment,2 she explains, "but I wanted something warmer. Poor Graeme, I made him come back four times with samples." The final choice is actually called Pamplermousse, French for grapefruit.

But colour is not the only drastic change. The clearing of old partition walls left room for a linked dining space, which meant that Graeme's design needed to maintain this sense of open space in the room. "Alexi, the interior designer, was very specific about managing the space." he explains, "so we used clean, well-balanced shapes. We took the cabinets to 30cm below the ceiling level to make the room lok wider."

Being only 5ft 2in tall, Jane also wanted to make sure that the kitchen cupboards were within her reach, so she stipulated that day-to-day storage should be accomodated in body-height cupboards. The island too is the perfect ergonomic height for chopping and other preperation work, she says.

Continuity with the rest of the 1840's house was another essential consideration, and led to a variety of finishes in the kitchen. "I wanted it to be modern and with no visible clutter," explains Jane, "but still in keeping with the feel of the house." As a result, the wooden floor and Trokowood island worktop give the room a timeless feel, and tie in with the dining room table that Jane already owned and was keen to keep. The elegent curves of the pewter taps and straight lines of the satin-nickel door handles mix contemporary chic with classic simplicity. More modern touches include the slick built-in ovens, stainless steel worktops and splashback, and a water cooler concealed behind a silver tambour shutter.

These extra mod-cons, such as a built-in coffee-maker and the Fisher & Paykel double-drawer dishwasher, make life in the kitch a lot easier, important for Jane as the mother of a six-moth-old baby. "Having the two drawers in the dishwasher that work independently is great because you don't have to wait around," she enthuses, "and the second sink is really useful too, because often one of them is full up with baby bottles!".