"Simple, clean, and organized" is designer Carol Glasser's mantra. She chose to lose a counter and L-shaped cabinets, remove
the wife's kitchen office, and accentuate the galley shape by adding two rail-straight runs of cabinets, shown above from
the opposite angle. A pair of refrigerators, one at each end of the counter on the right, hide behind paneled doors. Sunlight
pours through three casement windows, setting the pale blue-green cabinets aglow.
Photo: Stephen Karlisch
The goals were not all that different. Both couples enjoy entertaining. Both wanted to simplify and cut clutter. Both consider the kitchen the heart of the home. And they both hired designers to remodel their kitchens. But that's where the paths of these strangers -- one couple in Austin, the other in Greenville, South Carolina -- diverged.
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.
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."
