Kitchen Design Updates Traditional With Modern
This article was originally published on August 21, 2023; it was updated on August 31, 2023.
In this kitchen design, designer Nicholas Vanderhovel, CMKBD of Nashville-based Design Galleria Kitchen and Bath Studio pushed his own creative abilities – as well as those of his construction team – to craft a space that bridges the gap between traditional and modern in a fresh way. Using colors and materials as the starting point, the design takes the 1980s space comfortably and confidently into the present, in both appearance and function.
Vanderhovel said, “The color scheme we used may not be vivid or out of the box because we deliberately chose a palette that fit the home, versus following the trends. The living room adjacent to the kitchen is immaculately designed and brings in pieces from the clients’ sailing trips around the world. The designer who had interviewed before me wanted the homeowners to go with an all-white kitchen. I knew that would look out of place in the house if we did that, so I built them a color scheme that played off of the rest of the home.” The result is a modernized room that integrates with other spaces.
Travertine Tales
Both Vanderhovel and the homeowners fell in love with a richly colored travertine called Ocean Brown, and decided to use it as the countertops and as the range hood cladding. The latter element is one of the focal points in the room, and was a test of the team’s skills.
The designer explains, “That hood was definitely a labor of love. The contractor and carpenter on site had never built something like this before so we worked together to make it come to life. It seems like it would be pretty straightforward, but there were a lot of factors in play that affected the design and installation. The flanking pantries are actually shallower than normal in order to clear the casing for the adjacent room. This limited our space for the ventilation. We had about an 1/8-inch of wiggle room to get the angle of the stone, the stainless hood bottom, the hood vent, and room for the tile in there correctly. We originally planned to miter the bottom edge of the stone back and polish the eased edge, but after a few attempts to create the perfect angle, we opted to do an eased edge, so it wouldn’t be too sharp.”
To keep the slab in place, the on-site team created ledges in the framing structure to catch the epoxied blocking on the underside of the stone. A copious amount of Liquid Nails was also employed.
—By Leslie Clagett, KBB managing editor
