Home Tour: Kitchen and Pantry Design Details from the Hilltop Estate Project

Welcome to the kitchen at our Hilltop Estate project. Where do I begin? There is so much to take in in this gorgeous kitchen. Since the home kind of has these nice flowing sections, we decided to keep the stain consistent. So instead of doing a wood kitchen, because we have wood ceilings, we have wood floors, and we have some wood furniture over in the family room. We decided to go with this warm, I call it putty gray. It's not white, and it's not a cold gray. It's just a really nice warm color. In this kitchen, we wanted to do a more traditional profile, but modernize it by incorporating a mix of flat and raised. So you see we have a raised panel here, and then a flat panel here. And I love to do that when we do custom cabinetry. I always do custom cabinetry because we love to get all the profiles just right. We have this really chunky brass hardware, which has a back plate to it. And we've mixed poles and knobs together and did a Calcutta marble countertop. And that Calcutta marble countertop goes everywhere, even up the backsplash. And on these shelves over here in the coffee bar station, this slab took a lot of hunting to get it just right. And it incorporates a blend of all of the tones in the kitchen, and it just feels really organic. I just love it. You know, I love marble. That's no secret. And it's just the perfect look for a classic kitchen. So on Netflix, we do a mix of one-room reveals and we'll show our big custom projects. Those one-room projects are just for the show. The bulk of our business and our design firm focuses on high-end luxury custom homes. And so I'm going to show you some details that show you kind of that next level attention to detail. So right here we have this slab, and you have these steel windows that are perfectly fitted to the kitchen. And instead of just putting the slab on the wall, they've scribed the slab. You see that smooth profile between the window and the slab here. It's a detail that I geek out over, and it looks so great. We worked with Lombardi Construction on this home, and their attention to detail is incredible. We've got a lot of clean lines and some angles with the vaults, and we wanted to add in some curve. We have a curve on the faucet here. We have a curve on our pot filler here. We have this curve that we worked really hard to get just right. The La Conche range, you could put this in a blank room and it would be beautiful. And we did the black and the brass here, and I think it adds the perfect amount of contrast and ties in with the windows. When we do an apron front farmhouse sink like this, I always love to do a drip edge, and this is a detail that I came up with and did in my own home. Typically a drip edge is wood, and that goes here and it catches the drips from going on your cabinets. But here we did a marble drip edge, just like we did in my own home, and I love, love the look. We have an open space where we have a couple of rooms speaking to each other. We really need to think about the lighting, and we have tall ceilings, and we decided that we needed one large branching fixture that stretches over the island. We had this custom size to be the perfect length from the ceiling and stretch over the island. We have black shades with the brass inside, which ties in with the range and the materials that we're using in this space. You can see every selection we're thinking about how it ties into something else in the room, and that's that's really what brings like harmony to a space, how things really connect and speak to each other. The pantry is beautiful. I mean everything in this house is beautiful, but let me show you. So right here is this antique pocket door. We found this at a salvage yard in Arizona and shipped it in and cleaned it up a little bit, stripped it, but we didn't want to add a stain to it because it just looked beautiful in its raw state and added character to this new build. When we do this, we try to select them during framing so that they can frame to fit the vintage pocket door perfectly. If you're trying to do this in your own home and you have an existing door, you just have to find a door that is fitted to that, or sometimes you can shave a vintage door down to fit just right. In here, instead of doing a slab backsplash, we mixed it up and we did this pattern like painted tile. When you have a space that's like this wide, it's not like my favorite look to do just like one random floating cabinet, and so it's a good place to do some open shelving. So we did some display here. This is a soapstone, has this really great natural veining throughout, and then here we're thinking of, okay, I'm standing in the kitchen. Do I want to see cereal boxes when I'm looking into the pantry? Probably not. So we close these cabinets, but then you get some display off to the side over around on this side where you're not seeing every day. It's easier to hide, you know, the pots, pans, and things like that. So when I am selecting paint colors, you have to have some continuity. On the exterior of the home, we have some dark elements, and so we brought that inside. I think it just helps your home have a really nice flow. The kitchen opens up to the family room. It's a more casual space. This is the everyday hangout. So a sectional seemed appropriate because this is relaxed. This sectional is from McGee & Co. It has the shades on one end, and then we did it in a krypton fabric, so it's super durable. We did a lot of vintage rugs in this home. We've tied that in to the pillow textiles. I love this kind of like golden brown color that we have mixed with blue tones, and that was really the direction of the color scheme in here. Again, to create a comfortable space, I mean you could use a coffee table, but I think in ottoman it's a little softer. If you like to set out like remotes and candles and things like that, I always say just add a tray and it helps things feel finished. When you do a sectional, you know, sometimes you'll put like a pair of chairs here, but we felt like that was going to block the flow into this beautiful hallway behind me. So we did a chair at an angle. This is our Beckett chair from McGee & Co. And I never like a chair sitting completely alone, and so we'll just add an accent table like we did with this marble accent table here. Back behind me is probably my favorite piece in the entire room. I love antiques, and we had this big blank wall, and we found this incredible mirror. It's this carved wood. It's really tall. It reflects light beautifully, and then we did a tall tree in the corner. You don't have to just do a floor mirror in a bedroom space, and an antique still feels fresh even in like a really clean space. This is a built-in nook. We carried the color from the cabinetry in the kitchen, and we did this vertical tongue and groove, and then we did a cushion that we had laminated, so it's really wipeable and durable. This is our Reese chair from McGee & Co., and then we just took it up a notch for this custom home by adding a custom cushion. This is something that you can do. Take it to your local upholsterer, and then they'll make a template for it, and then make a cushion. So we did this chandelier above the island, and it has this kind of branching effect, and then we did a lantern in the family room, and they work together because they have a shared finish. They both have a consistent metal, but then differentiate the material to make them feel like they belong together. And because we have the nook over here, we decided to keep it simple, focus on the central vault lighting, and then keep this lighting all about the natural light coming in from the windows. Okay, so let's break this down. I am a big believer that so many of the design principles that we use in our high-end custom homes can be applied to any space. A builder-grade pantry can be painted. So could you go dark and moody? Could you make your pantry a statement? The answer is yes. It does not need to match your kitchen. It's a great place to try something fresh. The lighting. If you have a small open space, and you have multiple light fixtures that you can see all at one time, think about coordinating the metals, but differentiating the shapes. If you have a sectional, or a sofa with a chaise like this, go for a round coffee table or an ottoman, because it helps add some curves, and it's much easier to walk through the space. Layering rugs. If you don't have a lot of room for furniture, layering rugs helps you add more texture and more interest. It also helps you make a vintage rug that you fall in love with work, if it's not the perfect size. Last, you can take any chair, and you can take it to the next level by adding a pattern cushion.