The post Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The client and our specialist did the demo themselves — which tells you something about the kind of homeowner she is. This wasn’t a passive renovation. She knows the house, she had already worked within Richmond’s historic district guidelines on previous projects, and she is not the kind of person who hands off the keys and waits for a phone call.

Before Demo Started

Before demo started, I had already brought in a structural engineer. The 1990s renovation that installed the decorative columns had done so without adding a beam, and the upper floor had been quietly sagging ever since. The report confirmed what the floor was telling us, and the beam went in during framing, after the masons had finished their work.

The east wall window was next. The original opening was still legible in the brickwork from outside — you could read it clearly if you knew what to look for. It had been bricked in and plastered over at some point, and the room had been operating without it ever since. When the plaster came off, the opening was exactly where we expected it to be. The morning light that had been missing from that wall for who knows how many decades came back.

Opening the Walls

The historic masons came in and did the work that had to happen before anything else could: they removed the lower portion of the brick firebox to make room for the range — installing a metal header to carry the weight of the upstairs fireplace on the same run — opened the bricked-in window on the east wall, re-bricked the original back door in what had been the kitchen, and opened the wall on the northwest side to take the new french doors, installing a header there as well.

That back door had been the room’s connection to the yard when the house was built. Once the kitchen moved, it no longer made sense where it was.

The outdoor work had already been completed before the interior build began — a new patio, pergola, plantings, and shed — and the french door placement followed from that. Oriented to the finished yard rather than the original service entrance, the door went where we had designed the outside to be.

What Stays When You’re Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home

In a historic home renovation, the question of what stays is just as important as what comes out, and in this room the list was long.

The heartwood pine floors stayed — protected under rosin paper throughout demo and build, refinished when the work was done. The fireplace surround stayed, though not in its original form — more on that in a moment.

Throughout the entire home, our specialist stripped and refinished every original door, restored the hardware, and cleaned up the hinges — supplementing with reproduction hinges where the originals were beyond saving. Every original rosette was restored and reused. Where new millwork was needed — and in a room with new openings, there was plenty — it was made to match what was already there. If you didn’t know which pieces were new, you wouldn’t know. That’s the standard.

This approach aligns with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, which encourage repairing and preserving historic materials whenever possible rather than replacing them unnecessarily.

The Passthrough

The full-width double doorway between the new kitchen and the living room stayed, though we reduced the height of the opening. The lower portion became counter, sink, dishwasher, and storage — the door opening was exactly the right width for that run of cabinets. What remained above became a passthrough.

Victorian homes move light sequentially — room to room, front to back — and the openings between rooms are how that happens. Close that opening completely and the kitchen becomes its own separate world. Keep it, even at passthrough height, and the kitchen stays in conversation with the rest of the home.

Through the passthrough, the living room is always visible — warm gold walls, bookshelves, a round brass mirror — and the two rooms stay in the quiet conversation that a well-organized Victorian house is always having with itself.

What Came Back

The fireplace surround is the thing people ask about most when they see this kitchen, and the answer is that it never left — it just became something else.

The original Victorian surround was carefully deconstructed, and its millwork was used to build the range hood. The hood runs from the range to the ceiling, using the same profiles, the same proportions, and the same painted white finish that the surround had always had.

Behind the range, dark tile runs floor to ceiling — almost black — and at its center sits a pineapple tile mosaic, the one detail in the room that doesn’t reference the house’s history. It references the client’s.

The range sits in the exact spot where the firebox had been.

The Layout of a Historic Kitchen Relocation

The layout decisions in a historic kitchen relocation follow from what the room offers, not from an ideal plan imposed onto it. That’s particularly true when relocating a kitchen in a historic home, where original openings, windows, and architectural details often determine the layout more than modern convention does.

The room ran roughly 16 by 20 feet, with the range and restored east window on the east wall and the sink on the south wall.

The island sits at the center, where the room naturally places you when you walk in. The back of the island is built out with doors — outlets for charging, napkin storage, the things that accumulate in a kitchen and need somewhere to go that isn’t the counter.

A freestanding table adjoins the east side of the island, running east to west — not attached, able to move, able to seat people when the kitchen is in entertaining mode.

Custom stained cabinets run the perimeter, warm enough to read with the heartwood pine rather than against it. Upper cabinets have glass doors with decorative muntins. The heartwood pine floors run continuously from this room through the rest of the home, the way they always did.

Questions We Get Asked

How do you match new trim to original Victorian millwork?

You have a knife made from the existing profile. We pulled a piece of original trim, brought it to the millwork shop, and they ground a knife to match it exactly. Every new piece of casing and baseboard in the renovated areas was run from that knife.

It’s the only way to get it right — “close enough” is visible to anyone who knows what they’re looking at.

How do you relocate plumbing, gas, and electrical in a historic home?

Carefully, and with a plan for where the floors have to open.

We opened two sections of floor in areas that would be covered by cabinet runs — that’s where the plumbing connection to the rest of the home came up, along with the gas line extension and electrical. HVAC went to the toe kicks in several of the cabinets.

None of it is visible in the finished kitchen, but it required mapping the entire sequence before the first board came up.

Why relocate a kitchen instead of renovating it in place?

In this house, relocating the kitchen solved several problems at once. The former dining room offered better proportions, higher ceilings, and a stronger relationship to the yard once the new french doors were added.

Moving the kitchen also allowed the original kitchen space to become a flexible room with natural light and direct outdoor access. Sometimes the best solution isn’t improving an existing kitchen — it’s putting the kitchen where it always should have been.

What happens to the original kitchen space when the kitchen moves?

In this house it became Room 6 — a flexible space with good light, east-facing windows, and direct yard access. It holds plants, cats, and workout equipment.

Moving the kitchen didn’t leave a problem behind. It left a room that finally made sense.

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

Project Journal

Every historic renovation has a story. The story of this Victorian kitchen renovation unfolds across three journal entries:

Why the Kitchen Moved
Understanding what wasn’t working and why the dining room became the new kitchen.

Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home – – (current article)
The structural, masonry, and millwork work required to make the move possible.

Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space 
The completed kitchen and the details that make it feel as though it has always belonged.

→  View the project

The post Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

This Victorian home renovation began with understanding why the additions never quite belonged.

An 1889 Victorian home in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood had everything going for it — ten-foot ceilings, intact millwork, and a layout that still largely made sense — except for the columns and arch someone installed in the dining room in the 1990s.

There is a particular kind of renovation mistake that is easy to understand in the moment and hard to live with over time — the kind where someone looks at a room that already works and decides it needs more presence, more definition, more architectural detail, without fully considering what that addition is going to do to the space as a whole.

The 1990s were full of this kind of thinking, and the dining room of this 1889 Victorian had been living with the consequences for decades by the time Studio Olio came on board: a pair of decorative columns and a plaster arch, installed purely for effect, cutting straight across a room that had been generous and well-proportioned before they were installed.

What you were walking into felt smaller than it should have.

The ceilings were ten feet. The original millwork was intact. The bones were good. But decades of accumulated decisions — paint layered over paint, rooms adjusted and added to — made the house feel compressed in a way that its proportions didn’t warrant.

The homeowner knew this. She had already completed two renovations before we came on board, and she had done them carefully, working within Richmond’s historic district guidelines and understanding what it means to be a steward of a house like this. She simply didn’t want to go through the certification process again for this scope of work, and she didn’t need to.

The original kitchen, meanwhile, had spent those same decades in the back of the home, in an 11-by-11-foot room with a back door, two east-facing windows, and just enough space to function as a 19th-century service kitchen. Previously renovated in the 2000’s.

As a Victorian kitchen, it made a certain kind of sense — these rooms were designed to be out of sight, kept at the back of the house where the work of cooking could happen away from the rooms where guests were received.

As a 21st-century kitchen for a homeowner who bakes, whose husband cooks occasionally, and who entertains when the mood strikes, it didn’t work at all.

Moving the kitchen wasn’t a small decision in this Victorian home renovation (you can see how that unfolded in the next phase of the renovation), but it was a clear one, because the dining room sat at the center of the home with the ceiling height, the proportions, the light, and the connection to the rest of the house that a kitchen actually needs to function the way people live now.

We stood in the dining room before the renovation and felt the columns’ weight before you fully register them — the sense that the room is narrower than it should be, that the ceiling is farther away than the walls suggest, that there is something slightly off about the proportions that you can’t quite name until you look up and see the arch.

At a glance, the columns and arch almost worked, because they were referencing something classical, but the longer you stood in the room, the more it became clear that they weren’t speaking the same language as the house — or even to each other.

Victorian dining rooms were designed with specific dimensions in mind: wide enough to hold a table for a full family with room to move around it, proportioned to connect to the kitchen and butler’s pantry without either being visible to guests, tall enough to feel generous without feeling cold. The underlying logic of the room was still there.

What had changed was how it was being read.

The additions weren’t structural, which meant the arch and columns were introducing visual weight without doing any of the work that would justify it, and in doing so, they divided a room that had originally been meant to read as a single, well-proportioned space into something that felt narrower, shorter, and more constrained than it actually was.

The columns suggested one idea, the arch another, and the keystone layered on a third, so instead of reinforcing the architecture that was already there, they flattened it into something more generic, where the room lost the specificity it would have had in 1889.

The columns (also called colonnades) themselves weren’t entirely without precedent — by the late Victorian period you do start to see classical columns used to define transitions between rooms — but the arch was the giveaway.

An 1889 Victorian would have had rectangular cased openings with substantial trim, or at most a shallow segmental arch, not this kind of continuous rounded plaster form spanning between columns. That arch belonged to a different conversation entirely.

And then there was the keystone — a detail that only makes structural sense in a true masonry arch, where it is actually holding something in place. Here it was purely decorative, pulling from yet another architectural language: Georgian, Federal, Colonial.

Victorian columns, Mediterranean arch, Colonial keystone — three dialects in one opening, none of them quite right for an 1889 Church Hill brick Victorian, and all of them competing for attention in a room that had never needed any of it.

What the 1990s renovation was trying to do is easy enough to understand: break up a long sightline, add perceived grandeur, soften the transition between rooms. These are legitimate instincts. The execution just had no clear anchor, and the room had been living with the consequences ever since.

Why the Dining Room Needed to Change

Once we decided that the kitchen would move forward, the columns and arch stopped being a stylistic issue and became a functional one — they interrupted sightlines, constrained circulation, and turned what needed to be a working room into something that felt staged. They framed the wrong moment.

So they came out — not as a dramatic gesture, but more like an apology to the room.

Stripping that whole assembly out — the columns, the arch, the keystone — eliminated a false focal point, simplified the sightline, and gave the room back its proportions. Not as something decorated, but as something proportioned.

When does a 90s renovation do more harm than good to a historic home?

When it adds detail that competes with what’s already there rather than working with it. Victorian homes have an internal architectural logic — proportions, trim profiles, room relationships — that was developed over decades of building practice and refined to a high degree by the late 1800s.

A renovation that layers new decorative elements on top of that logic usually ends up fighting it, and the rooms feel it. The columns and arch in this dining room are a good example: they were trying to add presence to a room that already had more than enough.

Is it always worth removing a non-original addition in a historic home?

Not always — some later additions integrate well enough that removal would create more disruption than it solves. But when an addition is clearly at odds with the original room’s proportions and function, removal is almost always the right answer. The question worth asking is whether the addition belongs to the house or belongs to a particular moment in time that the house has long since outlasted.

What happens to the original kitchen space when the kitchen moves in a historic renovation?

It depends entirely on what that room was and what it was built to do. In this home, the original back kitchen had a back door, east-facing windows, and direct access to the yard — the exact right conditions for a plant room, a workout space, a sunny spot for the cats. Moving the kitchen didn’t leave a problem behind. It left a room that finally made sense.

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

Project Journal

Every historic renovation has a story. The story of this Victorian kitchen renovation unfolds across three journal entries:

Why the Kitchen Moved – – (current article)
Understanding what wasn’t working and why the dining room became the new kitchen.

Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home 
The structural, masonry, and millwork work required to make the move possible.

Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space 
The completed kitchen and the details that make it feel as though it has always belonged.

→  View the project

The post Victorian Home Renovation: Why the Kitchen Moved appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The stone

The countertops are grey and white granite with movement — the kind of stone that reads differently at seven in the morning than it does at noon. In a kitchen with three bay windows, that quality matters more than any trend cycle. Granite gets called dated occasionally, but in a Denver historic home renovation — original heart pine floors, restored Victorian millwork, a fireplace that came with the house — the question of whether a material is current misses the point entirely. The question is whether it belongs in this room — and this one did, completely.

I could sit in this kitchen and stare out the windows for hours.

The floors

Original heart pine — old-growth, narrow-grained, the kind of wood that takes stain differently than anything newer. I hand-stained every plank, then finished with a Bona high-traffic poly coat that would hold up to a kitchen that actually gets used. The warmth that came back is the kind you can’t buy in a new floor. Refinished, they anchored the whole room — dark enough to hold the drama of the black millwork and wallpaper, warm enough to keep the space from feeling cold.

Here is what the kitchen looks like from the front entry.

There is a clear line of sight into the laundry/mudroom at the back of the home.

The front door is painted a vibrant teal and you’ll find this brilliant blue as an accent in all of the rooms on the first floor helping to create a cohesive colour scheme. The orange colour on the visible laundry room wall complements the salmon of the entry.

I have added copper pulls to this original built in pantry and the copper on the wallpaper really pulls this wall together.

We don’t often use the microwave, so putting it into the pantry was perfect!

The built in pantry also has a passthrough that goes to the walk-in pantry. The colourful cloth is hiding the square hole because I didn’t want you to be distracted by the mess that is hiding back there! Once the walk in is complete, I’ll open the peekaboo hole up and you’ll be able to see right through.

If you look closer at the details you’ll find many mentions of what makes us feel at home; the Canadian teapot in the pantry, the painting of my very first dog Jules who has long since passed, the cookbooks that we’ve collected over the years featuring adventurous cooking and materials that bring us joy.

The fireplace

The fireplace was never restored to working — it would have been a significant undertaking, and the room didn’t need it to function as a fireplace to do its job. The exposed brick uncovered during the renovation stayed exposed, the gold-framed mirror went above the mantel, and the fireplace became what it was always going to be in this room — presence, and the thing that tells you this home has been somewhere.

A huge part of the charm of this house is the original features, like this Charles Eastlake latch that is on our pantry doors. We have similar original hardware on our front door and Eastlake inspired fireplaces in other rooms of the home.

What it felt like

The cooktop in the island meant that cooking happened in the middle of the room, with the bay windows behind you. The butler’s pantry under the stairs held everything that would otherwise crowd the counters. The open shelves kept the room breathing.

I could sit at that island and watch the birds out the windows for hours. Two people could cook together without getting in each other’s way. The heart pine floors creaked in exactly the right places.

This kitchen didn’t announce itself. It settled in — like it had always been there.

Which, in a way, it had.

O-Ren and Mags say they like their new kitchen too!

—

The post The Finished Kitchen: A 1911 Folk Victorian appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Here is a short video of me feeding a line set through a wall. It was three seconds long, but I slowed it down to show 10 seconds.

There was also a happy surprise. When the walls opened up above the fireplace mantel, the original brick was there — intact, just waiting. It stayed exposed. It’s still there.

The post The Build: What It Actually Takes to Renovate a 1911 Kitchen appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Before anything gets built, there’s a period where the room exists only on paper — and the job is to find the layout that stops arguing with itself.

For this kitchen, that took five iterations before I got to two concepts worth presenting. A room with three bay windows, two single doors, a set of French doors, an original built-in, and a fireplace requires that kind of rigor. Every opening is a constraint, and constraints in a room like this compound quickly.

What got decided and why

The sink wall went between the two single doors — the only run long enough to hold it. Open shelving above rather than upper cabinets, because upper cabinets in a room with this much light and this many original details would have competed with what was already there. I built the shelves from ash slab — cut, sanded, sealed, and installed on hidden brackets.

The island went in the center of the room with the cooktop built in. The orientation was deliberate: sitting at either end of the island, the bay windows are directly behind you — the light, the greenery, the shelf of plants. The island had to be shortened from the original plan — the flow from the living room to the refrigerator required it, which is something you confirm by taping the layout on the actual floor and walking every path before anything gets built.

No upper cabinets anywhere in the room. The bay windows needed a plant shelf, not cabinetry. The built-in painted black, with the botanical wallpaper — black ground, gold branches — running the full wall on either side. That wall didn’t need anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I keep the original built-ins in a historic home?

Almost always yes. Original millwork is the hardest thing to replicate convincingly. Removing it saves almost nothing and costs the home something it can’t get back.

What do you do when a historic room has too many openings for a functional layout?

You work with what the room gives you. In this kitchen, five openings left two usable walls — that determined everything: where the sink went, where the island went, why there are no upper cabinets. Constraints in old homes are usually solvable once you stop fighting them.

Why avoid upper cabinets in a historic kitchen renovation?

Upper cabinets work well in kitchens that need visual weight or additional storage. In a room with original millwork, significant window area, or strong architectural details, they often compete with what’s already there. Open shelving keeps the room breathing and lets the bones show.

The post The Layout: Five Openings, a Fireplace, and What Victorian Homes Were Actually Saying appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The first question every contractor asked when they walked through the home was the same: “How about we just put the kitchen where the old kitchen was?”

Every time, my answer was no.

The original kitchen was the smallest room in the home. One window. The main back entry — where you came in from the car, from the yard, from the world — opened directly into it. It was dark, it was cramped, and it sat at the back of a Folk Victorian built in 1911 that deserved better.

I knew where the kitchen needed to go the moment I walked into the room in the middle of the home.

The room that wanted to be a kitchen

Three large bay windows. Greenery outside. Light coming in that changes through the day and makes a room feel alive.

The room had almost certainly been the dining room at some point — there was a built-in passthrough directly from the walk-in pantry, which told you everything about how the home had originally been organized. Someone had understood this home once. The passthrough was staying.

There was also a fireplace. Original, like all of them in the home. Not working, but present — the kind of detail you don’t erase just because it’s inconvenient. It stayed.

And then there were the openings: three large bay windows, two single doors, and a set of French doors leading to the living room. Five openings in one room, plus a fireplace, plus a built-in. Every contractor who said no was looking at that and seeing a problem. I was looking at it and seeing a kitchen.

What made the original kitchen wrong

The size was wrong. One window in a home full of light is a waste. But neither of those was the real problem.

Victorian kitchens were never meant to be seen. They were back-of-house by design — separated from guests, separated from family rooms, tucked away from everything that constituted the presentation of the home. The kitchen was a workspace. It produced heat, smell, noise, and mess, and the entire floor plan was organized to keep all of that invisible.

The butler’s pantry was the pressure valve. It sat between the kitchen and the dining room and did several things at once: it staged meals before they were presented, stored china and silver and linens, and kept the chaos of the kitchen completely hidden from anyone sitting at the dining table. Food moved through it quietly, in an organized way, without the dining experience ever touching the work that produced it.

The back stairs did the same thing for movement. Whoever was running the household could move between floors without using the main staircase. Supplies went up, laundry came down, and the front of the home stayed calm. Two parallel systems: one for living, one for running the home. The layout wasn’t decorative. It was functional logic.

By the time I bought this home, the staff were long gone — but the bones remained. The butler’s pantry was still there, tucked under the rear staircase, with shelves on each side and a large window. The passthrough was still there, connecting it directly to the room that would become the kitchen. The rear staircase was still there, but it no longer worked for modern living.

Moving the kitchen corrected that. The old kitchen became what a back-entry room with a parking-side door actually wants to be: laundry, mud room, tool storage. The home didn’t lose a room. It gained two.

The decision

Moving a kitchen in a historic home means new plumbing, new electrical, new ventilation — all of it relocated, all of it permitted. Every contractor saw the cost and the complexity and suggested the path of least resistance.

But the path of least resistance would have left the smallest, darkest room in the home doing the heaviest daily work, while the room with three bay windows and an original fireplace sat there being something lesser. That’s not a renovation. That’s just moving furniture around inside a problem.

What it became

The island and the bay windows became the anchor of the room — the kind of place where you sit down with coffee and don’t leave. I could watch the birds out those windows for hours. The flow worked. The storage worked, especially once the butler’s pantry found its home under the second staircase — but that’s the next post.

This renovation made something clear to me that I haven’t stopped believing since: historic homes already know how they want to be organized. The logic is in the bones. The job isn’t to impose a new plan — it’s to find the one that was always there.

That’s why I do this work.

—

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — start with a complimentary discovery call.

→ Next: The Layout — Five Openings, a Fireplace, and Why Victorian Homes Were Built the Way They Were

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you move a kitchen in a historic home?

Yes — though it means relocating plumbing, electrical, and ventilation, all permitted. The question isn’t whether it’s possible, it’s whether the original layout is actually serving the home. Often it isn’t.

Will moving a kitchen hurt the historic character of the home?

Not if it’s done with the original logic in mind. In this case, moving the kitchen restored the home closer to how it was meant to function — the back room returned to a service entry, the kitchen moved to where the light was.

How do I know if my kitchen is in the wrong room?

Start with how the room feels to use every day. If the entry, the light, or the flow feels wrong, it usually is. Most historic homes have a logic to them — sometimes the kitchen just ended up in the wrong place over time.

The post Moving the Kitchen: A 1911 Folk Victorian appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

If you’ve been following along with the Fall 2018 One Room Challenge™, then you are already pretty familiar with our Folk Victorian Kitchen. If you are new here, you can go here to see the first post in the series or go here to see the full reveal.

To recap:

We started with a room that wasn’t ever a kitchen before.

It has three large (but low) bay windows filling one whole wall, a doorway leading to the front entrance, a fireplace, french doors leading into the living room and another doorway leading into the back mudroom/laundry that is beside the built in pantry.

It looked like this:

And ended like this:

First the cabinet layout:

We have three outlets on the island, one on each side (except the range side). I’m very happy with the placement of these. Don’t forget outlets on your island, and place one more than you think you’ll need. I’m going to upgrade the outlets to a colour that blends in more with the grey wood than the stark electrician white!

The island cabinets are different on each side. This cabinet layout  (as shown in above photo) has two shallower drawers and 4 deeper drawers. One of the shallow drawers is my own personal ‘junk drawer’ and the other shallow drawer holds typical things you would find in a shared ‘everything’ drawer along with a few kitchen gadgets.

I used expanding bamboo drawer dividers and this allows us to customise each drawer.

This is one of the deeper drawers where we store our large dinner plates, our tiny food prep or sauce bowls plus a few bowls that don’t match the others!

On the other side of the island we have one shallow drawer, two deep drawers and a pullout garbage and recycling drawer. The bins pull out and it’s super easy to empty the recycling.

At the front of the island, on either side of the range there are two slim cabinets. The one to the left is a pull out spice drawer, and came with four shelves. I don’t keep my spices in the typical cylindrical jars, so I removed two shelves plus I really wanted to use this pull out to hide all of our spatulas and wooden spoons!

I use hooks with magnets to store our oven mitts and this great little pan scraper, that also works on the range top. Tools that have more than one function are amazing!

The other side we store cutting boards, baking pans, pizza paddles. I have some metal dividers that still need to be installed to keep them all separated.

On to the elephant in the room…..

The refrigerator.

Placing the fridge in this room was a challenge with all the doors, windows and the built ins.

My logical mind thought that we should get a counter depth fridge (they are shallower) so we could extend the island by 6″. My pragmatic husband weighed in and thought we should get the full sized fridge instead as we love to entertain and could fit more beer and appies! (Canadian for appetizer.)

In my initial design I had the fridge facing the front door because we were going to flip the way the doors opened into the living room. We ultimately decided not to go that route and had enough room that the fridge could face the window.

Looks like it fits really nicely right? It does, until you open the doors! And it didn’t quite make it through the reno unscathed, the bottom now has a couple of dents!

We knew that the door on the left would not fully extend while the fridge is pushed back into place. The photo above shows how far each door opens. The right side is the full extension.

I haven’t found this to be much of a constraint on how we use and clean the fridge, but this could be a no go with some clients. Our tradeoff is we have ample room for entertaining and storing foods.

Keeping the counter and open shelves functional

Here is the styled shot you saw earlier in this post:

Here is how my counters look today. I used items I really do use everyday to style the shots. The copper compost bin was in front of the acacia wood lazy susan that you see here.

I like, erm need, items to feel neat and organised. I can’t stand coming down to the kitchen and seeing a mess. Having all the items we use everyday on the lazy susan, keeps everything accessible to both of us while working on opposite sides of the island.  The huge bonus — the lazy susan keeps everything orderly for me!

After styling the lower shelf, I decided I loved having the two books on the lower shelf. They are the “Flavor Thesaurus” and “Kitchen Hacks”. Beside them are two canisters that hold flour and sugar.

The only thing that I changed on the lower shelf is removing the blue sorbet bowls and giving the black bowls their own place.  We use the plates, glasses and measuring cups nearly every day.

On the counter we have our instant hot water heater, that I would prefer to be over on the dog feeding station. It’s leaking a little so while the new one is on the way, the heater stays on the counter.

Obviously I removed all of our scrubby brushes from the styled shoot, but real life wins the everyday styling. I didn’t want the brushes lying in the sink, or on the counter, so this tub saddle allows us to have them accessible but not in the forefront. If you scroll back up to the image above you’ll see them peeking out.

Our dogs are pretty active. O-Ren below loves to hop up on the window sills and catch flies or watch (aka, bark loudly) at the squirrels.

Active dogs = supplements! As already mentioned I can’t stand clutter, so decanting their food into prettier containers and hiding the rest in the drawer does the trick!

I still need to find a pretty bottle for the fish oil, but for now it sorta blends in to the white wall.

The top and the part of the drawer hold the items we need to make our pups food every day. Ideally the hot water dispenser would be here too,  and will be once the new (non leaking) one arrives.  In the meantime the cutlery which still doesn’t have its final home is sitting in its place!!

I’ve been collecting pretty dishware for some time and love that I get to showcase it on our open shelves. If that’s not you, then closed cabinets are perfect!

The moral of the story is: design and organise based on how you and your family actually use your kitchen (or want to use your kitchen)!

I offer e-design services for those of you not local and in-person consultations and design if you are in the RVA (Richmond, Virginia) area.

If you are stuck in a rut or need some help, email me,  I’d love to work with you.

The post Want To See My Drawers? An inside look at cabinet layout and open shelf styling. appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

And so, here is the full reveal of the finished Light Filled Folk Victorian Kitchen for the One Room Challenge™.

Come on in.

I could sit in this kitchen and stare out the windows for hours.

The white walls, natural materials and plants give the room a Scandinavian feel. The pendant lights still need to be moved over. That’s a long story for another post!

An opportunity arose for a plant nook where the bay window juts out.

I chose this slab of ash to make the shelves out of because of the worm eaten edges. We have similar worm marks in our floors and carrying this pattern into something new helps keep it in character.

If you remember the second post in this One Room Challenge™ Series, there are three entryways in this kitchen. Though each room connecting to the kitchen is its own separate entity, to provide a feeling of flow and continuity, the rooms need to relate to one another.

The bright salmon entry is definitely a statement!  As you walk into the kitchen you’ll notice the rugs, plants and books picking up that colour.  This relates the white and black kitchen back to the entry so that they feel as though they belong together even though they are designed to have a different impact.

Here is what the kitchen looks like from the front entry.

There is a clear line of sight into the laundry/mudroom at the back of the home.

The front door is painted a vibrant teal and you’ll find this brilliant blue as an accent in all of the rooms on the first floor helping to create a cohesive colour scheme. The orange colour on the visible laundry room wall complements the salmon of the entry.

I have added copper pulls to this original built in pantry and the copper on the wallpaper really pulls this wall together.

We don’t often use the microwave, so putting it into the pantry was perfect!

The built in pantry also has a passthrough that goes to the walk-in pantry. The colourful cloth is hiding the square hole because I didn’t want you to be distracted by the mess that is hiding back there! Once the walk in is complete, I’ll open the peekaboo hole up and you’ll be able to see right through.

If you look closer at the details you’ll find many mentions of what makes us feel at home; the Canadian teapot in the pantry, the painting of my very first dog Jules who has long since passed, the cookbooks that we’ve collected over the years featuring adventurous cooking and materials that bring us joy.

A huge part of the charm of this house is the original features, like this Charles Eastlake latch that is on our pantry doors. We have similar original hardware on our front door and Eastlake inspired fireplaces in other rooms of the home.

While we have modernised this kitchen with updated wiring, plumbing and appliances, a lot of thought and consideration went into making sure to preserve the history this house offered us. We’ve kept all the porcelain door knobs, as much of the original wood as possible and re-created what was damaged. We love the old (mostly original) windows and will not be replacing them with vinyl or any such tragedy!

My perspective is a home isn’t ALL about the looks. It really needs to consider how each person uses the space and what elements to include to ensure that you enjoy your life being at home in your home.

O-Ren and Mags say they like their new kitchen too!

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That’s it for the Fall 2018 One Room Challenge™.   

I’d like to thank Better Homes and Gardens, as they are the official media sponsor as well as Linda Weinstein for starting and continuing the One Room Challenge™.   

Candis & Andy, from Home Love Network are scouting the guest participants and two will be selected by Better Homes and Gardens to participate as featured designer during the next round.

This was my first time participating as a guest and I am hooked! This was a motivating kick in the pants to finish the details and write about the process. I personally find it easier to speak about the work I do for my clients than the work I do for my own home. Thank you to all of my readers and commenters, I’ve really enjoyed the process and I hope you’ve enjoyed it too!

Don’t forget to check out what the  selected designers and other guests  are up to in the One Room Challenge™.

Did you miss previous posts in this series? Check them out here.

Week 1 – Adding a Kitchen – The Before
Week 2 – Kitchen Layouts and Plaster Dust
Week 3 – Electrical, Plumbing and HVAC

Week 4 – Walls, Floors and Trim

Week 5 – Cabinets, Counters and Lights

The post Light Filled Folk Victorian Kitchen – Finale appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

I didn’t have time to paint all the trim before the cabinets came in, so I painted the lower corner by the far left window that would be difficult to paint after the cabinet install.

The appliances and lights all got delivered and are all stacked here awaiting installation by the electrician.

One of the cabinets came with an extra hole in the door that did not get caught by the cabinet makers quality control team, so they are making me another door.

I got all the trim painted, woo hoo! Next are the final coats of the white wall paint.

I primed the fireplace (and all the doors) with an oil based primer so that subsequent coats of paint stay without scratching or flaking off.

I haven’t mentioned the lighting in any previous posts, but these images below capture the spirit that I was going for. The lights will look similar, but will not be exactly the same as what is pictured below!

I am saving the full effect for the big reveal next week, but here is a glimpse along with our first meal in this house not made on a campstove or the grill outside!

And yes, we used the oven.

Here is the ash slab that I am making the live edge floating shelves out of for the kitchen sink side of the room. It looks a little rough here, but after lots of sanding they look pretty great!

I’ve mentioned the pantry several times over the last few posts, but I highly doubt it will get done in time. Do look for it in a future post though.

That’s it for this week in the One Room Challenge™.  Next week I’ll show you the whole kitchen.

Don’t forget to check out what the  selected designers and other guests  are up to in the One Room Challenge™.

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Did you miss previous posts in this series? Check them out here.

Week 1 – Adding a Kitchen – The Before
Week 2 – Kitchen Layouts and Plaster Dust
Week 3 – Electrical, Plumbing and HVAC

Week 4 – Walls, Floors and Trim

Week 5 – You just read it!

Week 6 – The Finale – Light Filled Folk Victorian Kitchen

The post Cabinets, Counters and Lights! – Part 5 appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.