The house belongs to Lothar and Rob, a creative couple with backgrounds in art and architecture. After more than 25 years with the original kitchen, they wanted it to work better day to day. It was small and irregular in plan, with very little daylight, and it was cut off from the dining room behind, with its bay window and garden views.

Storage was central to the brief. Over the years the couple have built up a substantial collection of porcelain and glassware, and they wanted to display it without the rooms feeling cluttered. They also needed integrated appliances and a calm, practical layout.

Rather than knocking the two rooms into one, we removed the dividing wall and replaced it with a bespoke screen with a hatch at its centre. The screen combines open shelving, closed cupboards and sliding doors in fluted glass. It holds much of the collection, frames views between the rooms and lets light through, while the obscured glass keeps the display looking ordered. The hatch connects kitchen and table when it’s wanted, without committing to a fully open plan.

With no straight walls and a narrow footprint, every cabinet in this bespoke plywood kitchen was drawn from a blank page and made to fit. Many were sized around specific pieces in the collection. The cabinetry is in our Edge style, where the exposed plywood edge shows how each piece is made. It was this detail that first drew the clients to our work.

The palette is deliberately simple. Oak-veneered plywood and a matt Wedgwood Blue laminate sit beneath Carrara marble worktops. Colour also tells the two rooms apart: the kitchen is mostly blue with selected oak fronts, while the dining room reverses the balance, so the same cabinetry runs through both spaces with a different character in each.

In the kitchen, a Bora Pure hob with built-in extraction sits in the peninsula facing the hatch, with Siemens ovens and a fridge freezer in tall housings alongside. Deep drawers with plywood dividers hold pans, utensils and dry goods. A larger undermounted sink sits beneath the garden window, with integrated bins below.

We designed, made and installed everything. The finished kitchen gives the couple far more storage in the same footprint, a place to live with their collection, and the two distinct but connected rooms they had hoped for.

Client’s view

“From the outset, we felt our ideas were really understood and thoughtfully developed. It wasn’t easy to keep the original character of the Victorian terrace while introducing modernist kitchen furniture throughout, but somehow Uncommon Projects have done it! It’s very successful in creating the feeling of two distinct but connected spaces, just as we imagined it.”

Lothar and Rob

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