A kitchen is reborn

Sunset, July, 1994 by Daniel Gregory

Finding serenity between rocks and a hard place

BLOODHOUNDS AND bohemians alike feel at home in this remodeled kitchen. It's outdoor-oriented and urbane, informal yet elegant: a literary haven and a gardener's delight. Once sunk in obscurity at the rear of the house, it has become center stage.

Wedged between the dining room and a 6-foot-high retaining wall at the bottom of a severe uphill slope, the original kitchen was cramped, poorly lit, and cut off from the rest of the house. The owner turned to San Francisco architect Heidi Richardson for help.

Richardson expanded the kitchen by borrowing space from a small adjacent patio. She solved the daylighting problem when she discovered that the ceiling was high enough to allow the kitchen floor to be raised by 2 feet. This extra height, combined with the removal of the retaining wall's top stone course, allowed a generous band of windows along the kitchen's south- and west-facing walls. Richardson set the windows just above the counter to provide maximum daylight and to open up views of the slope from the kitchen's major work areas. With plants at eye level, the kitchen feels like a greenhouse at the bottom of a garden.

To bring southern light deep into the house, Richardson removed the wall between kitchen and dining room. Now both dining and living rooms share the kitchen's light. Wide stairs create a graceful link between kitchen and dining room, while clearly defining each space. The stairs also set the kitchen off as a kind of stage, on axis with, and visible from, the rest of the ground floor.

The kitchen is organized around a central work and storage island. With its overhead bank of glass cabinets, the island functions as an elegant three-dimensional screen between dining room and kitchen proper. From the dining room you can even catch a glimpse of the garden through the suspended glass cabinets.

Mindful that the opened-up kitchen should function as an extension of the more formal dining and living rooms, the architect conceived of it as "a library in which to cook," with warm, red-brown Honduran mahogany cabinetry taking the place of actual paneling. Counters are zinc. The owner delightedly explains, "We wanted the new kitchen to look like an old bar, and that's what we got--it's like a Paris bistro."