Light and Bright
In the Austin kitchen, Glasser went for a clean look with simple cabinet lines, statuary marble countertops, and cool plaster walls. She mixed powdered pigment into the plaster to give it a deep, mottled limestone color. “The plaster gives a character and patina that you don’t get with paint,” she says.
The designer wanted to simplify the long, narrow galley kitchen. The wife’s workspace created a bottleneck at one end, so Glasser moved it to an adjacent mudroom. Removing the L-shaped bank of cabinets that had defined the workspace, she created one long, straight countertop along the wall, removed the upper cabinets, and added three large casement windows, flooding the space with light.
“I wanted to make everything simpler, plainer, and fresher,” says Glasser, who is adamant about losing upper cabinets. “It forces you to edit -- to get rid of all the jelly jars and plastic cups, to find more space.”
In addition to deep, well-divided drawers in place of lower cabinets (“lower cabinets require you to stand on your head to find anything,” she explains), Glasser included floor-to-ceiling pantries -- one for small appliances, one for dishes, another for food. She installed refrigerators, both paneled to blend with the pantries, at either end of the long countertop.
Part of her secret is getting to know her clients and how they live. “I always plan a kitchen around how my clients actually use their stuff,” says Glasser. “Getting people organized really makes their lives better. We all have to be in a kitchen. We should make it a joy instead of drudgery.”
