The heart of the home

We’ve often heard the old cliche: the kitchen is the heart of the home.

I’ve always wondered why.

Is it because there is something soulful about a room whose purpose it is to feed and therefore sustain the family living there?

It certainly isn’t a space where my family spend the majority of their time – that would be the living or family rooms.

Having said that, in the Waldorf, the kitchen is smack bang in the middle of the ground floor surrounded by all the living spaces where we will be spending the majority of our time.

James Treble’s advice was to spend money where it matters, and given the centrality of the kitchen in our floor plan, this was most definitely an area where his design advice was free flowing and unconstrained by the mortal concerns of our budget.

All up, it looks like the upgrades may well cost us about $35k. Probably money well spent; at least that’s what I like to tell myself. Annie thinks that we need to take an attitude of investing in the future. A larger marginal outlay now will make us happier in the long run, she says.

Some of the upgrades we included:

– Polyurethane cabinets with a shaker door profile. Polyurethane – how can something so unappealingly named be so desired for a finish? You could call it 2-Pak instead but unless you’re a fan of rapper, that’s not particularly appealing either. Note – Tupac was awesome.

– Drawers rather than cabinets, as per James’ advice. Much easier to reach into the back to get things out and you therefore create more useable space.

– Upgrading the stone to Crystallite, but we kept it at 20mm thick. Quartz slabs, by the way, are always 20mm and the choice to upgrade to 40mm, 60mm or 80mm that people often choose is really just another piece of quartz stuck on at a perpendicular angle. What’s the point? Unless you have Calacutta. I’d drape myself in Calacutta if it were socially acceptable.

– Upgrading the Gallery to include bench tops and another sink. We intend to keep the majority of our clutter of appliances in the Gallery (toaster, coffee machine, Thermomix, kettle, rice cooker – gosh that’s a lot).

– Increasing the wall cabinet height to 2340mm.

– And for a touch of extreme decadence: two pyrolytic ovens. That’s totally baller territory right?! We considered an upgrade to a 90mm oven but James pointed out that our desire to cook multiple things at once may be better served by having two ovens instead and it comes with the added benefit of being cheaper to run when you’re only cooking one thing.

This is what our kitchen will look like:

Our colour choice was: Whisper White for the cabinets and calfskin for the island.

Whose job is it to name colours? Whisper White has some beautiful alliteration, albeit combining two words that combine to mean precisely nothing. Calfskin on the other hand…am I the only one who doesn’t get hungry when thinking about calfskin? Still, Calfskin is better than “poo-grey” so it’s a good thing I don’t have this job.