Kitchen Design’s New Basics

With bright white subway-tile-covered walls, and an ebony-stained limestone countertop to match similarly stained oak flooring, the newly expanded kitchen designed by Keni Neff of Kitchens for Cooks and built by Royce Flournoy and team at the Texas Construction Co. is a model for the “classic contemporary” style.

No single element stands out for its particular beauty or its uniqueness. Instead, the whole space — bathed in an abundance of natural light — conveys an understated luxury and quality that leading contractors, remodelers and kitchen designers say is becoming more common in these slower economic times.

The kitchen, part of a $700,000 whole-house remodel completed in February, is certainly like others that have been seen often in recent years. The style speaks directly to the Real Simple magazine tastes of many in their 30s, 40s and 50s. But where the classic contemporary style was once employed by a minority of remodeling clients, it seems to have achieved majority status and is called for more frequently than the heavily adorned, ornamented, and formally classic looks it now supersedes.

“The days of over-the-top crown moldings, very traditional heavy moldings and heavy ornamentation with lots of finishes is definitely becoming the 20 percent as opposed to the 80 percent,” says Judith A. Neary, CMKBD, an NKBA design education instructor who works for cabinetmaker Pacific Crest Industries of Sumner, Wash. “What we saw for many years was moldings, trim, accessories, fluted pillars, fluted columns, beaded moldings, beaded doors, distressed finishes, multiglazes, etc. Now we are seeing cleaner and less fussy, simpler designs. I would call it the classic contemporary.”

And, as Flournoy can attest with his whole-house remodel, clients with money are spending it to get what they want despite the shift toward understatement. In Flournoy’s kitchen, pictured on the cover of this magazine, his Gen X clients chose to incur the substantial added expense of putting a steel girder in place under their new kitchen as a means to support a desired monolithic, single-piece, 2-in. thick slab of limestone as a countertop for their center island. They were unwilling to accept anything but limestone’s unbroken, seamless perfection. Flournoy says it took 15 people to carry the limestone into the house and place it on the island.

“They didn’t like the veining found in granite and they did not like the cracking that happens with concrete,” explains Flournoy. “So the limestone, once it was stained, gave the look of concrete without the imperfections.”

When asked why he thought his clients would be willing to incur this type of expense, Flournoy touched on a theme echoed by many contractors, remodelers and kitchen designers whom QR contacted — an overriding interest in value. Something as pricey as a huge piece of limestone can be seen as a value if one considers its importance to the rest of the kitchen design and its durability.

“They were extremely value based in all of their selections,” Flournoy said of his clients that chose the massive limestone countertop.

Picking designers and making selections

It would be easy to conclude that kitchen design and the kitchen remodeling business is altering in step with the economy — that the gilded age of the mid-2000s has given way to a leaner and cleaner aesthetic in all parts of the country and across all groups of clients. But that is not the case. Kitchen remodeling, like most other businesses, has been impacted by the global economic decline of the past few months, but designers, remodelers and architects are feeling it differently depending upon the individual buying characteristics of their clients as well as local economic conditions.