Heart of the home: this open, efficient kitchen borrows space and color from the garden - Home

Sunset, April, 2003 by Jil Peters

A lot of happy living goes on here. It's apparent the moment you pass through the Dutch door into Tera and Rick Ayotte's big, friendly kitchen, which is the focus of their modest, 1,500-square-foot home in Hermosa Beach, California. The light and airy 375-square-foot room is the product of a carefully budgeted renovation.

Tera's sister, Danelle Guthrie, is an architect, and she helped the Ayottes put their money into the spaces they would value the most. As a result, there is no huge master suite or whirlpool bath. Instead, there is an open, breezy kitchen with a table designed for large gatherings of family and friends. The kitchen pours out onto a deck and a garden that is the perfect size for Tera to maintain on her own.

The Ayottes used the space of their two bedrooms to expand the kitchen, dining, and living areas, and they reconstituted the master bedroom, a nursery and a shared bath on a new second floor. They also created higher ceilings in the kitchen and adjacent areas for a feeling of greater spaciousness.

Made for entertaining

After 20 years as a chef, including a half dozen restaurant openings and running her own catering business, Tera was ready to be a full-time mom, but she is still passionate about cooking for others. Every couple of months she has a party for 10 to 20 guests. "When you have a big family, you can't narrow it down," she laughs. With such large groups in a relatively small space, flow is critical. Explains Guthrie: 'The kitchen is situated so that it presents itself as the most important element in the house. All other rooms are organized off of it."

The kitchen merges into the dining space, which is home to an old farm table flanked by a church pew (a $60 garage-sale find) and a bench--perfect for traditional familystyle eating. "We knew we'd have the biggest possible table that would lit in the space," explains Tera. "It works just as I'd wanted it to. It calls out to people to come hang out, and it encourages them to linger."

Tera often sets up an additional table outside when she's entertaining large groups. Although the doors are a standard size (which helped keep costs down), they are hinged at the middle so they fold to one side, leaving the opening to the deck completely clear. The garden is filled with succulents, grasses, and of course herbs for cooking--family-friendly plants so the space can double as a play area for daughter Emma and the family dog, Lucy.

Efficient, easy, and colorful

The key to tidiness is efficient storage. At one end of the kitchen is the home's nerve center--a 25-foot-long storage wall that houses stereo equipment, cookbooks, and anything else that needs to be kept out of the way Two fiberboard panels coated with chalkboard paint mask the washer and dryer. The well-used panels display everything from grocery lists to emergency numbers.

The materials in the house are durable. "I want people to drop by, so I wanted the house to be very easy to keep clean and tidy," says Tera. The low-maintenance Australian cypress flooring is carried throughout the downstairs of the house. The kitchen countertops are CaesarSton--a nonporous surface suited to rolling out dough. And the bathroom is tiled from floor to ceiling, making it easy to clean and ideal for hosing down little ones after a day at the beach.

Guthrie gives Tera credit for the palette of deep, earthy, red and green hues, which carries through from the front entry out to the back garden.

DESIGN: Guthrie + Buresh Architects, Ann Arbor, MI (734/998-3229)