MODERN MANOR
Where beauty comes to order
With a large, extended family, including a newborn baby, all living under one roof, and a tradition of eating together, when the owners of this townhouse in south-west London embarked on a full property renovation, they invited their interior designer Studio Miaki to work with Sola Kitchens to design a quietly understated space where they can prepare light meals but the emphasis is on fine dining.
The Brief
'While we want a fully functioning kitchen with all the usual modern conveniences, the room will also be our dining room, where we will eat together as a family and entertain, with chef-prepared meals brought in via a dumbwaiter. As such, the room needs to look and feel serene and elegant, with cabinetry designed as fitted furniture around the dining table and chairs, and spacious enough that all the working kitchen elements can be hidden but easily accessible. The walls will be lined with wallpaper, and we want natural wood for the cabinetry, possibly with some metal but nothing too shiny, so the scheme blends seamlessly with the décor of the adjoining family room and the rest of the house, including a small pantry upstairs that we want to be designed to match the kitchen and fitted with a little fridge, a sink and Quooker tap so we can make tea and coffee without needing to come downstairs.'
The designer's solution is a masterclass in spatial arrangement and alignment, technical detailing and layering with a strict palette of materials, textures and colour tones. Floor cabinetry from Sola Kitchen's Fjord range is skilfully combined with bespoke versions of the wall cabinets from its Rattan range, and the distinctive 20mm-deep frames of the Fjord are not only perfectly aligned with the beaded detailing of the Rattan, the cabinetry is also perfectly aligned with the window and with the herringbone-laid parquet floor. The pale natural oak was another carefully considered choice, to soften the framing effect of the built-in furniture and make the room feel light and airy at the edges while also focusing the eye on the beauty of the dark wood dining table in the middle of the room.
To reduce the need to constantly negotiate the table while preparing light meals, all the functional cooking elements, including an under-counter microwave and oven, and a Bora downdraft hob and the sink, fitted with a Quooker tap into the Taj Mahal quartz worktop, are arranged along one side of the room, while all the storage cabinetry is on the wall opposite. The space between each gadget was carefully measured to ensure enough space to manoeuvre between them and that the doors and drawers open fully with the table and chairs in situ.
Special Features
Service please: One of the most technical aspects of this project involved the design and building of the cabinetry to enclose the dumbwaiter. To avoid it becoming a visual distraction and changing the room's focus from fine dining to kitchen, the fixture needed to be hidden within the cabinetry but of course it needed to function properly, and it needed to be easily accessible. It also had to have a fully rated fire-proof door, and the Sola Kitchens designer dedicated many hours working closely with the project contractor, HigginsonGrey, to design and build the cabinetry so that today, no guest would be unable to identify it unless shown.
Dream weaving: Studio Miaki worked with the Sola Kitchens designers to devise a bespoke version of the kitchen company's rattan-fronted cabinets for use in this kitchen-dining room. The final form features oak pieces of beaded molding applied over the rattan surface, with the ends of the verticals and the horizontals meeting to form a cross in each corner of the door fronts.
Hot metal: The interior designer was keen to incorporate a metal element within the runs of cabinetry and wanted something that would have a subtle gleam, not a high shine. Sola's liquid bronze metal frame above the hob and sink has a just the right gently gleaming qualities, with metal-finished glass fronts so that the water glasses can be glimpsed but not be a distraction.
Materials & Finishes
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3.- Taj Mahal Quartzite
- White Stained Solid Oak Fjord
- MDF Sprayed in Liquid Metal
The process
