East Rock Renovation
This kitchen/family room extension is located at the rear of a 19th century Victorian home in an urban setting. The 17’x 32’ addition is a single open space with a 10’ high ceiling and a clean, modern feeling that seamlessly coexists with the traditional, elaborately detailed existing home. The south facing addition projects into the family’s oasis-like garden, where large expanses of steel-framed glass on three sides provide ample natural light and views of the lovely garden. This new center of the family’s life exists in the liminal space between the house and the garden.
The grid of the coffered ceiling and the axial layout of windows and doors help organize the single room into discrete cozy areas for cooking, dining, and relaxing, while maintaining an open, loftlike feel for the entire space.
The owners requested a highly functional kitchen that looked clean and uncluttered but could exist in harmony with the original home. The mantel-like rangehood is the focal point of the kitchen, and echoes the fireplace mantel, original to the house, which is the focal point of the sitting area. Open shelves provide storage for dishes and glassware, but everything else is put away. Therefore, the pantry was designed to be a storage powerhouse, where two pull out pantry columns provide plenty of space for canned and boxed goods and glass doors open to reveal a coffee station with additional shelves and drawers for daily use items.
The cabinetry and millwork were meticulously designed and constructed as a single interconnected work of joinery. This seamless integration of interior architectural details exists in the original Victorian home, and it was important to us and to the homeowners to have that same sensibility in this new space, albeit with more modern details and materials.
General Contractor: Eric Rose, EM Rose Builders, Inc
Interior Design: Gray Orchanschi Architects
Photos: Nancy Elizabeth Hill