Location
Walthamstow, London
Materials
Yellow and white Formica on birch plywood
What did I make?
Doors and drawer fronts with integral handles.
Island unit incorporating standard and modified Ikea units
What would I charge for a similar project?
£4000.00
What the client said
I wouldn’t be standing in my dream kitchen right now if it wasn’t for Duncan. Such a pleasure to work with from beginning to end and so easy going. He was so patient with me in the beginning when I barely knew what I wanted and helped navigate me towards the perfect kitchen layout. His work is of such a high standard and at a really reasonable price…if you want to make designing your kitchen a more enjoyable and exciting process go with Bespokea!
The Story
This was a very familiar building project. An existing kitchen extension was being extended again to make it wider and to knock through to the rear living room to create an open, bright kitchen diner that would become the focal point of the house and family life.
The difficulty the client had was in narrowing down the options available. She liked the idea of combining bespoke with Ikea and committed to working with me to create something…. Because she wasn’t too far from the workshop, she was able to pop round several times to bounce ideas off me and to look at samples.
Much of the layout was dictated by the positions of walls, services and doors. This lead to an L shaped kitchen, with an island that meant she had a work surface to use that faced the rest of the room and also defined the zones within the room.
It was decided to have taller units on the front of the island. This would serve as storage for non-kitchen items, it concealed the mess of food preparation and gave somewhere to put some sockets.
The yellow made a great impact, but we felt it should be contained to stop it being overwhelming. As such, it is only used for the base units in the kitchen area. The doors on the living area side of the island are in white as are the wall units.
We discussed what wood to insert in the integral handles. It was decided to keep them in plywood. To keep them consistent in colour and without exposing inherent knots etc inside the plywood, I made birch inserts, thus keeping the look without the problems.