The South Carolina kitchen was lacking something. It had plenty of sunlight, banks of cabinets, and acres of granite countertops, but it all seemed, well, perfunctory. The room had no soul. “You walked in and got a sense of ho-hum,” says the wife.

So architect Mark Maresca turned conventional wisdom on its ear by recommending less natural light, as well as ebonized cabinets that darkened the space even more. For the opposite reason -- to flood the Austin kitchen with sunlight -- designer Carol Glasser gave her clients an equally radical suggestion: Get rid of all upper cabinets and add windows.

The designers’ suggestions caught the homeowners off guard. But both couples eventually came around. The result? Two classic kitchens, each with its own personality.

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.”

At night the space is lit by a range of light sources, including small-aperture ceiling lights (small can lights that provide sharp spots of light), under-cabinet lights, and a row of elegant pagoda-shaped hanging fixtures that Maresca designed for The Urban Electric Co.

More subtle than the lighting in the before-and-after photos are the room’s proportions. Maresca gave the kitchen a pleasing verticality (important in a room filled with horizontal banks of cabinets) by removing the soffit above the old cabinets and extending the new upper cabinets to the ceiling.

He moved a pair of structural columns and beefed up the walls that frame the opening between the kitchen and sitting room. Not only does the two-foot-deep wall give the architecture more weight, but it also hides the ice maker and bar appliances housed in built-in cabinets on the morning-room side of the wall.

Dark cabinets with cinnabar-red interiors were another part of Maresca’s plan to give the kitchen more character. “I wanted this kitchen to look refined,” he says. That meant adding cabinetry details reminiscent of a Regency period cabinet -- restoration glass doors with delicate divided light patterns and drawer fronts with small beaded edges. Nickel pulls give the kitchen a timeless feel.

That’s important to Maresca, who intentionally avoids kitchen trends, such as appliances that happen to be in vogue. “Kitchens are the rooms that become dated the quickest,” the architect says. “Nothing in this kitchen screams that it’s the latest and greatest. That timelessness is more pleasing, more sophisticated, and elegant with a sense of reserve.”