Scouring the Pantry for Ideas

The new year brings thoughts of our kitchen. With a high-sloped ceiling and original french terracotta tile roof, our kitchen is a bit rustic and charming. The question we are currently wrestling with is how to design a kitchen that fits the existing character of the room while blending well with the rest of the house.

First step - look for inspiration. One obvious idea is a hacienda-style kitchen typical of the grand houses built a few hundred years ago. Used predominantly by servants, in a time before running water and microwave ovens, these kitchens functioned very differently to the way we cook today.

This, of course, should not hold us back. Couldn’t we adapt this style to our modern life? Certainly plenty of people have.

The kitchen at Los Dos cooking school in Mérida

For us, the problem with such kitchens is that they are re-creationist dreams. Dressed up with intricate Puebla tile (thanks Frida Kahlo), ornate extractor fans and polished copper pots dangling from the ceiling, these kitchens are dramatic set pieces. Dressed up to woo guests with high drama, they create the fantasy of a hacienda lifestyle. A lifestyle of what - a rich servant perhaps?

Granted, there are many examples of such kitchens that look great and work well. It is, however, not the right idea for our stripped down, relaxed minimalist design ethic. We spend a lot of time in our kitchen and need a functional space to whip up a nice meal while remaining relaxed enough to suit our hideaway aesthetic.

We also want a space that won’t drive us mad with ornateness. Maybe we should consider a modern gourmet kitchen with clean lines and plenty of counter space?

This sleek gourmet kitchen screams modern minimalism and we love it. Although we’ve dreamed of hiring the designers at Boffi to bless our kitchen with their products (and pay an arm and a leg in the process), we know in the end this style of kitchen is simply wrong for our house. With its sleek lines and 21st-Century materials, this kitchen is anything but rustic. It would, in the end, sit uncomfortably in our house, scoffing at our old-world terracotta tiles.

Our kitchen is rustic and we need to respect that. At the same time, our house is modern and minimalist, so we need a kitchen that reflects that as well. So perhaps it’s time for some modern rustic inspiration?

A kitchen in Perigord Nord, France by Greet and Armand

This kitchen represents where we’re heading. It’s relaxed and clean with a whiff of rustic. The open shelving and lack of high cabinets give it a relaxed, livable feeling. The lightly varnished wood and stone floor evoke the idea of a slower time without being specific. The cabinetry feels like furniture, equally at home in a dining room and the kitchen. It is in such a space that we imagine ourselves comfortably passing the time of day.

Ensuring You Want It Enough

On one side of our eat in kitchen, we have a large 3x3m opening that looks out into the rear garden.  Our plan is to transform this gap into a key “money shot” moment in our design.  But how?

Looking around for inspiration, we found the pavilion at the Kampong Gardens in Coconut Grove, Florida.

Between brick columns, the architect has decided to erect wooden frames with no glass or screens.  It’s purely ornamental and fantastic.

The frames transform an otherwise typical line of columns into a series of windows that outline the garden beyond.  By creating this false barrier, the garden feels like it sits apart, heightening your sense of longing.  As they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Staging a Vista

While walking along Collins Avenue in South Beach, Miami, we passed by an alcove running alongside a hotel.

We were inspired by the way this space is carved with long paths that accentuate the depth of the site. We also liked how the bodega sits nestled within the greenery, framing the line of umbrellas and drawing the eye toward the mystery beyond.

Like many properties in Mérida, our property is also long and thin. The hope is to design our garden in a way that draws the eye deep into the site, where the back boundary connects and merges with the trees and buildings beyond. We are in the midst of developing a garden design that ultimately achieves this.

An Urban Forest

While scouring Miami’s Design District oggling at high-end designer furniture we can only dream of owning, we stumbled upon this little courtyard surrounded by a dimpled copper fence.

This garden lounge, designed by landscape architect Enzo Enea, is about the size of our central courtyard, so we went inside and (over) analyzed it.

We love the strong horizontal and vertical lines working across the space. Seating is informal and the whole room seems equally capable of hosting an evening dinner party or a quiet afternoon with a book. With the sparse plantings composed of only a few species, the overall feeling is that of a restained urban jungle.

The only thing that gives us pause is the bamboo. Although beautiful, our landscape architect friend Patrick says that mosquitoes love to breed in the hollow branches and should therefore be avoided in mosquito-rich Mérida.

Research is Tough

We decided to swing through Miami on the way home to research outdoor living spaces and gardens. With a camera in one hand and martini in the other, we scoured numerous hotels, art deco buildings and public gardens in the Miami area for inspiration.

Our first stop was the outdoor lounge (pictured above) at the Setei hotel in Miami Beach. Although far more decadent than anything we will construct, we were impressed by how well the space achieved a level of intimacy.

We have looked at a great many waterside seating areas for inspiration in our own  project.  Most, like the JH House, leave us feeling a bit cold.  The typical bright blue sheet of water with adjacent (but not integrated) seating area lacks a certain intimacy.  Great if you want to lay out with a book, but not the right setting for a dinner party with close friends.

By inserting seating areas into the pool, the outdoor lounge at the Setei got it just right.  Surrounded by water, we were able to admire it without disengaging from the table conversation.  Nestled this way, it felt private and serene.

The wooden canopy overhead added intimacy by subtly outlining an outdoor room within the larger courtyard.  The dramatic height of this canopy helped to lift us out of the courtyard and connect us with the sky above.

How all this applies to our renovation will require some more thought.

Reinventing an Old Room

Historic colonial homes in Mérida were often built in stages.  Initially, a one- or two-room building was constructed hard up against the street.  Each room would have high 14 to 18 foot ceilings and attractive wood or iron beams for support.  Over the years, new rooms were tacked on the back of the houses with progressively lower ceilings and less ornate support (i.e. no fancy beams).  With the back of some houses being 100 years younger than the front, a walk through them is a journey through the ages.

If you were looking to buy an old colonial here, you would no doubt be shown many houses with high-beamed ceilings in the front rooms.  We certainly were.  We pictured ourselves restoring these rooms to their former glory and looking magazine perfect.

The problem is that we simply couldn’t imagine ourselves inhabiting these beautiful spaces.  In general, front rooms directly off the street are noisy.  Ours sounds like the waiting room in a bus terminal.  Also, with sunny weather all year round, who wants to be cooped up inside, especially in a room with few windows and no ventilation?

The front room of our house has all the problems mentioned above.  To add insult to injury, although moderately high, the ceiling is without beams, has no historic value and is just plain ugly.

The ugly duckling of a ceiling in our front room.

What do do? What to do? After staring at our design documents for the last four months, a solution finally arrived in the form of the DELETE key.  A single keystroke has blown away the roof and transformed the room into a light, airy entrance courtyard.  Add a fountain, a plant, 20-foot whitewashed walls, and we think we’ll have a winner.

The inspiring courtyard space of Porte Royale, a riad in Marrakech, Morocco.