Before Nicole Arruda, a creative at Nicole Alexandra Design Studio, embarked on a kitchen renovation in New Providence, New Jersey, she called in a professional organizer to back her up. “I saw mugs, K-cups, and coffee beans sitting on the counter and thought, 'I need a place to store these,'” Arruda recalls. (At the time, her client was expecting her first baby, so the abundance of stuff was fine.)
The designers quickly discovered the real problems: The refrigerator was awkwardly positioned, the cabinets weren't maximizing their storage capacity, and the peninsula cut off the boundary with the adjacent living room. Plus, the bathroom around the corner was old and narrow, with an overly long shower in the middle. Tidying up allowed Arruda to return to her work with a calm mind.
To avoid hitting the fridge door when you go out
The refrigerator's previous placement was not only bad feng shui, but also blocked the entrance to the dining room when the designer's clients opened the fridge door. The first major change Arruda made to the layout was to move the newly paneled refrigerator to the opposite wall, closest to the living room.
Along the way, Arruda rejected the peninsula and had contractors build a narrow island just 28 inches wide. “They said, ‘There’s no way it’s going to fit in.’ I said, ‘No way.Yes I will!“The sturdy side of the structure closest to the stove had space for a microwave. The rest of the island is open underneath, with enough space for four stools.
Follow the flow of the flooring
While it was tempting to replace the tiled kitchen floor with trendy wide plank flooring, for Arruda, it wouldn't have solved the problem at hand: Every other room on this floor has narrow planks. Though it wasn't Arruda's first choice, it would have been less expensive to replace the kitchen floor with a matching hardwood. “Rather than spending thousands of dollars stripping it all down, we just sanded it all down and stained it a natural color,” she says.
Hide the essentials
When the designer's clients first visited, they had bags of beans on the counter because they had been drinking coffee since before they had babies. a lot The coffee machine can still be used at night, Arruda points out, so she wanted to give customers the option to install a countertop bar with a small brass sink and pocket doors to tuck the machine and mugs away out of sight.
In a small kitchen, details like this can make the space look a little bigger. Arruda also wanted the extractor hood to be unobtrusive, so she covered it with the same Zia tile she used for the backsplash. The worktops are polished quartz with a soapstone look, and the cabinets are painted Sherwin-Williams Connected Gray.
Fake closed storage using fabric
When designers told their clients they could install a pantry, they almost didn't believe them—”They looked at me like I had five heads,” she says—but she saw it as an opportunity to take away square footage from a nearby restroom. That meant blocking off the passage from the kitchen to the bathroom, but since there's a second door near the front door, it wasn't really a loss.
There was no room for drawers in the shallow space, so the designer provided her clients with cafe curtains made from the same performance fabric used for the kitchen's Roman shades, providing enclosed storage for the blender and crockpot.
Take a shower right after breakfast
The homeowners were perfectly fine with Arruda downsizing the powder room to add more storage in the kitchen, but they were adamant about keeping the shower. “My husband was used to using the shower on the main floor; having to go upstairs all the time wasn't what he wanted,” the designer says. With the addition of kids and grandparents, keeping the shower made even more sense.
She relocated the shower to the shortest wall and covered it in blue-black battle armor tile from Cre Tile Co. The sink was sourced from Chateau Domingue, a Houston-based architectural antiques store. “They have everything from tile to the fireplace mantels. It's one of my favorite places,” Arruda says. When the 19th-century piece arrived, it had a light gray sheen, but Arruda asked her contractor to finish it with a sealant that protected the stone and gave it a rich sheen that better matched the shower tile.
The brass-trimmed divider was custom-made, and in such a tight space, “the door wouldn't fly,” she says. “It would hit the sink or a hook on the wall.” A curtain would have been a more cost-effective solution, but the designer points out that it would have made the space feel even more enclosed. “The idea was to make the shower a focal point,” she says. The custom sink also has plenty of storage space, so there's no need to call in a professional organizer.
