After purchasing a classic 1940s bungalow stripped of its original charm, these Seattle parents of two young boys turned to interior designer Jessica Nelson to restore it. Their goal was to reintroduce character through architectural details while keeping the home modest and family-friendly. The warm, cozy interiors were inspired by the front porch entrance’s custom white-painted wood lattice trellis structure, joined at the top in an arch and with jasmine vines beginning to grow.
One of the primary objectives was establishing a kitchen that could transition effortlessly from busy school mornings to intimate dinner parties. At just 90 square feet, the original galley kitchen was cramped and inefficient. Nelson reimagined the floor plan, converting that space into a butler’s pantry and moving the kitchen to the back of the house to capture views of evergreen trees, Lake Washington and Husky Stadium.
This article was originally published by a www.houzz.com . Read the Original article here. .
Kitchen at a Glance
Who lives here: A couple
Location: Lumberton, New Jersey
Size: 204 square feet (19 square meters)
Design-build team: Anne van de Rijn (designer) and Nick Zizzamia (project manager) of Cipriani Remodeling Solutions
Before: The former kitchen felt stuck in time. Short, dark wood cabinets — none reaching the ceiling — made the space feel low and cave-like, and creamy beige solid-surface counters did little to lift things. Storage was a constant frustration. “The kitchen was beautiful in its day,” designer Anne van de Rijn says. “I knew it was a quality kitchen when they originally did it, but it needed to be brightened up.”
The island was a particular pain point — slender, matching the dark perimeter cabinetry, with seating for just two and storage on only one side. A pair of small pendants hung too low overhead. The sink location worked, but across from it a refrigerator shared a wall with a built-in desk that had long since stopped functioning as one. “The desk was the first thing you hit when you came in from the garage, so it became a landing space for clutter,” van de Rijn says.
The cooking wall was equally cramped: Two wall ovens squeezed in on either side of a gas cooktop left almost no counter workspace, and a microwave mounted above the cooktop couldn’t properly ventilate the space. “And it just wasn’t pretty,” van de Rijn says. One bright spot the homeowners wanted to keep: the red oak floor, which they knew would bring warmth to whatever came next.