Country kitchen reveal of our farmhouse in France

Bonjour everyone, welcome back to the channel. In this video I'm finally going to show you the kitchen. The kitchen in the Cook's Cottage, the rental that we'll start renting out in 2023 and that we're currently using as our home. If you're new to the channel, welcome. My name is Marloes and I moved to France with my sons and my husband in 2019. Originally from the Netherlands and we bought this as a holiday home but we spent here one week and then decided we did not want to go back to the Netherlands and we decided to move here permanently. We're in Burgundy which is a beautiful wine region. We absolutely love it here and since 2019 we're turning this old farmhouse into a couple of holiday rentals and just the dream family home that we've been dreaming of. On the channel I take you along in all of our renovation works and our simple slow life here in the countryside of Burgundy. Back to the kitchen. This space was originally the stables. It is the former stables of our 150 plus, you don't know how old it is, year old farmhouse. That area is our personal space when our renovations are finished and then this part, really cute, with a large vine is going to be the cook's cottage. A holiday home that we're currently living in as a family and that will be a rental as of next year 2023. So when we thought about how we wanted this kitchen to look, we wanted it to be both authentic for this region and practical. We did not want to have a built-in kitchen like you'd get at IKEA. We wanted it to be something more personalized, something more traditional for the region. So before I dive into all the choices we made and all the things and ideas we considered, I know many of you are dying to see the result. You can already see a little bit behind me. So I just am going to add some clips here of the finished results. We were really happy with how the kitchen turned out and it wasn't an easy project. So as with many projects for the build and the renovation, I don't know if you're somebody that really has a clear view of what you want, a vision. For me, I have a feeling rather than a vision. So the first thing I always do when starting a new decoration or renovation project is create a Pinterest board. And I actually went back to my Pinterest and I'm happy to share it with you so I can share a little bit more about how I go about designing a space. Because I know when I think about a space and I need to design it from scratch, I never get a clear image of what it needs to look like. The vision comes as a feeling. I know what I want it to feel like. I know how I want to feel in this space. I feel what I want to experience, what I want it to invite me and inspire me to do. So you could also include those kind of images or make a separate board just with how you want to feel and then start with your board for the design. I actually just started with a design board and just start pinning any image that speaks to me in one way, shape or form, even if I can't tell you what I like about it. And I just start pinning that and I start at the bottom of my board because you'll see that as we move north, it gets more refined. So as you can see, I started off with some more colorful examples, especially for the backsplash, some more darker tones and wood that you see in Belgium and Dutch homes and I quickly moved away from that, honestly. And then I just start even pinning decorating ideas, anything that I like. Here I had the first few images of concrete, cellular concrete structures. The only thing I knew for sure is that I wanted a Lacange range because that is from this region. This particular image was very important to me and I'll explain to you why in a minute. When you're pinning, you pin a nice image to your board and then Pinterest gives you like 10 others and you pin the ones you like and it isn't until you go back to the bigger board and scroll through it that you can see all your individual images in a bigger context. And for example, these darker like black kitchen cabinets, I liked the image but then when I see them next to the other images, I could immediately feel that my preference was for a lighter tone kitchen and then I could leave that behind very quickly. This particular image is actually the leading image. I think at some point you find that perfect image that feels like everything about it makes you feel happy. It is becoming the leading image in your board, right? So while I just got to the end of this, I felt like okay, I think I've got it now and then what was left was the backsplash. I really was so afraid that that would kill the entire look and I'll explain by going back to that image that I said was so important. That is this one. This is to me the image of how not to do it and it's tricky because all the elements that we used in our kitchen are exactly the same. The limestone countertop and sink, the la canche range is the exact same color and finishing that we chose with the brass finishes and the color ivoire. The backsplash is zely tiles. Those are Moroccan glazed tiles, very stylish but they don't all have the same color and shades, hues maybe is the better word. So you pick a color for example beige but then you get a batch with all difference that's from the process of how they make them. So it's difficult to get a good view of what that will look like in your kitchen and the issue with zely is that they're quite pricey and I couldn't find anywhere where I could try a couple. You can't just try one or two because they have so many different hues. You need at least like 10 to get a good feel for what the final result in your kitchen will be and I couldn't take a couple of tiles from the showroom with me to my home. So that got really tricky for me and I kept having this image of how how it went completely wrong in my head and that is because the colors don't go very well together and the finishings. There's a lot wrong with the finishing I think in that kitchen. So I ended up just taking tiles at my regular hardware store that are fake zely that weren't extremely expensive and I just bought a box and I was able to lay them out against the wall so I could see this is what it will look like. I was very happy. So using Pinterest this way is the ideal way for me to design my dream kitchen in this case. One of the biggest choices to make when designing this kitchen was the countertops. What kind of material did we want for the countertops and I collected so many images on Pinterest and I could see that I love a more natural look. So either wood, stone or concrete even. That's something that we're considering for the big kitchen but I also wanted it to be very practical. So I want to be able to just put a hot pan or pots and pans or things from the oven straight onto the countertop. Now you would think that is easy with concrete countertops but actually you can't put a hot pan on a concrete countertop. The concrete will be hurt by it but you have to protect the concrete with a specific layer to protect it from water and stains and everything. As I understood that layer can't really stand the heat shock. I really like the look of wood but I didn't quite see how I could make that work. I also really like just putting little pieces of furniture together and then that's a very traditional way of building a kitchen here in France. You just get a small maybe a chest of drawers and then next to it you'll have another piece of furniture and then you just put that all together and turn that into the kitchen. But then since this is in such an open space we thought it would be a bit messy. It wouldn't really work very well. So all of these considerations led us to designing this with concrete cellular concrete blocks and then we went with the pierre de bourgogne for the countertops which was a big investment but it immediately gives our kitchen this traditional look. It's the pierre so the limestone from the region. It's only like 20 minutes away and I also really like the sink this way. I like having this large shallow sink. Some people say that's not practical. It actually really is for me. I can put all my stuff even in the sink. It works almost as an extension of the countertop and as you can see the kitchen isn't very big so you need a lot of space to put stuff. And the other I think eye-catcher of this kitchen of course is the stove. La Cange is a village. That's where these are made and I can walk to the village. It's literally the next village. So I just felt this was a really good way to honor the the pride really of our region and of our village. What I really like about it is that it has a traditional look. You can also get more modern versions. I'm not affiliated to them in any way by the way or sponsored. I'm just genuinely very enthusiastic about about the stove. I thought initially oh it's it's maybe just a lot of marketing but honestly I've made my bread in it. I've made my cakes in it. I've made my tarte in it. I've made my clafoutis in it. I don't cook meat so I can't say anything about putting big pieces of meat in it but I can see that everything really comes out so much better. Also what I really like about these stoves is that you can completely personalize them. So here you can actually custom design your entire oven or your entire cooker. So you can choose the size. We have this smallest one. We'll have a bigger one for our big kitchen and then you can choose even which knobs you want. You can see how do you want the top. Do you want gas induction and then you can just choose your colors of all of these samples. You can either just take it in plain black or you can pay a I think this goes really well in a traditional farmhouse like ours. So look they have all these beautiful greens, more neutral tones, all kinds of blues and what I really like very bright colors like this blue or this yellow or orange. I just think it's amazing. More traditional colors like the green or the Bordeaux and I really love that. It was really difficult picking the color. Like they have a very nice pink as well. So you can really give this eye-catching element to your kitchen. We ended up just going with a very neutral beige color. It's called Ivoire. It is just, I think it's just amazing. So you can really create the cooker of your dreams and actually have really large ones that are almost like professional ones. Isn't that amazing? I mean I could never fit that in my kitchen and I don't need it. But that is what I really like. Pride of our region. Proud to have one in our home. Also what's really helping me is that I've allowed myself to make mistakes. So I sometimes just buy something. Maybe I can't even return it after. I just take it home, see how it works and then see if it works or not. So for example this plank. A lot of people on my husband's youtube channel said they absolutely hated these brackets. And I get that because floating shelves are really the new thing apparently. We didn't like that actually. We didn't think a floating shelf would fit very well with a traditional older style kitchen. So this is very intentional. It was the least ugly ones I could find. I'll be honest about that. I actually stained this and it turned out very orange. I don't have an example but it was so orange that I decided to sand it down all the way back and actually left it in its natural color which I think turned out best with the front that we put in for the dishwasher. I initially wanted to make that the same color as I have on this large cabinet here. But then when I saw the entire thing I felt it didn't work. This is going to go. This was in my van that is still at the garage. But then when I saw the kitchen I thought it was nicer to stay with all the brown tones. So this is what I mean when I say that I can't design a kitchen from scratch and give it to someone that will make it for me. I'm so happy that Olaf and I are able to do that all together and change things as we go. Yeah so if you have any questions about the kitchen we are going to make a second kitchen and that's through there. So let me give you just another quick tour of this space so that you understand where we are. So we're currently using this space as our family's living area. It will be a cottage as of next year 2023 that we'll be renting out. And our idea was that this is going to be a space for you know people that maybe even want to come in the fall or spring or even winter and have this nice wood burning stove. This will be a lounge area and there'll be a dining area here. So one of the couches will go out and I'll put a nice table in that's actually already here. It's the one that you see there. It's a round table. There we'll put a bed. A nice comfy warm large bed. And over there in the corner will be the bathroom. So this is going to be a lovely space with you know the centerpiece I think of this space will be the kitchen which is why we called it the Cook's Cottage. And I'd like to end this video with a huge shout out to my husband Olaf. We couldn't have done any of our projects without him, without his incredible talent, his imagination, his ability to see things and actually create basically anything that I can come up with. And I even appreciate him for the sometimes annoying questions he asks me about all the tiny details but that actually make every project we do even more beautiful than I could have imagined. So there is many many more projects that we are going to do together in this great renovation of our farmhouse. So if you're interested in that please do keep following us. If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet please do so if you want to follow more details about the renovations you can also follow Olaf's channel which unfortunately is in Dutch only. And please also leave us a comment about what particularly you liked about this kitchen. We'd love to hear from you and I hope to see you in a next video.