Hampshire, UK - I have always been fascinated with antiques, architectural salvage and old industrial bits and pieces since I was very young. But it is only when I first came to England over twenty one years ago that the salvage bug truly got me. The English and their love of nostalgia is nowhere to be found but on this small island and highly contagious.
Before I became an interior designer and garden designer, all the houses I ever lived in were full of old bits and pieces I collected here and there - I even found a solid oak pulpit in a field once; I promptly rented a lorry and asked a farmer down the road to help me load it -since then bad backs have ensued but I am still proud of that find.
Recrafting old items is now part of my work - I guess you could call my work eclectic. As an interior architect I get to know a house intimately from its building materials to how the family want to use the space. To live in the twenty first century furniture needs to fulfil a plausible function. It cannot just be aesthetically directed - it has to be fit for purpose.
In this case study we recrafted shopfittings as a kitchen for a client. Built from mahogany these shop display cupboards dating back to the early twentieth century were discovered in an antique centre in Salisbury. Filthy, and stacked at the back of the large warehouse - I really like their simple stripped down look. At the time I did not know what I was going to do with them but bought them anyway - I was certain to find a purpose for them.
The client had moved from London to the countryside and bought an Edwardian house that had not been touched in over fifty years. Dating back to 1907, the house still had the old wiring, a flower room, three pantries, a water room (!) and a tiny kitchen space. This needed to be changed into one space. A large sociable kitchen with a spacious dining area since the client would be entertaining a lot.
The client, an industrial designer, loved anything old and engineer-like but he did not want to have a pastiche of an Edwardian interior. And neither did I, to be honest. After all, admiring the past is all about moving forward, otherwise there would be no yesterday. Throughout we retained the architectural elements of the house: the extensive cornicing, the old floors, the dados, high skirting boards, window furniture as well as door furniture dating from that period.
The client had looked at numerous kitchens - none were to his taste. So I told him about the old shop fittings I had. At first sceptical - I often find clients need to be weaved into a visual story about how their house is going to look once finished - he understood the idea behind it. He liked the fact that in one of our conversations, he had mentioned how he loved the old hardware shops and pharmacies where you could see all the bolts, tools, pills, potions and food stuffs lined up on shelves behind glass. These shop fittings were exactly that.
There would be a fair amount of work to recraft these tired, dusty and dirty cupboards into a modern kitchen but he decided that my detailed explanations were good enough and told me to run with it.
I had two very large cabinets measuring over two metres high. The cabinets' bottom parts were only 50cms deep with four doors on each cabinet and the top cabinets screwed onto it were glazed with about 15cms deep shelves. Definitely not something that would accommodate plates, pans and glasses effectively, let alone give enough countertop space.
First we separated the bottom from its top cabinets. Secondly we made the bottom cabinets much deeper, in actual fact they are much deeper than normal kitchen countertops would be and higher too. This suited the client as he is a very tall person. Having separated the top from the bottom I had enough space to put items away underneath the shelving and lots of countertop space too. I chose a granite countertop that would suit the colouring and would be hard wearing.
The kitchen was rather large and I knew we did not have enough cabinets to go round. So I commissioned the local joiner to add to it. Made from iroko, a hardwood, deep brown-red in colour to match the mahogany, we French polished it to look like mahogany; I mixed the new additions with the old.
I made a special cabinet to house the two ovens, with a roll out drawer at the bottom for baking and roasting tins and added a bus railing I had also found at an antique centre. The draw rolls our effortlessly and is a great use of a dead space. I then had the joiner copy the two-door floor cabinets to house the two sinks along with the dishwasher and designed display shelving for the client's collection of kitchenalia and stuffed fish.
Since my bottom cabinets were now much wider, I decided to get inner drawers that roll out on soft close runners. Easy to pull out a drawer with heavy pans than go and fish around dark deep shelving! This makes it a very modern and functional kitchen whilst retaining an elegant but simple look and it saves on back aches for the tall client!
To integrate the kitchen and the dining area, I designed a bar, again with the same detailing as the shop fittings to link the two. Here we had a mix of old and new once again - incorporating iconic seating from Eames and Panton and a modern oak table on reclaimed flooring with all the old architectural details and white walls..
To relieve the dark wood and make it more contemporary there were numerous colour touches to relieve the wood texture such as orange and lime green - this lightened the look but also gave it a sense of fun.
From the stuffed pike placed over the washing up area to an impeller above the fireplace to a propeller taking up a large expanse of wall, the decor was eclectic. Client happy - designer happy - this is what I call eco but not loco. And can I just add that the client and the designer were so happy and liked old stuff so much - we married!
- - - - - -
Francoise Murat is a degree qualified Interior Architect and Garden Designer. She runs workshops on Interior Design for period homes and contemporary houses. She also writes for Country Life and Sarah Beeny on interiors and gardens. Visit her website for more information.
Françoise Murat & Associates
Francoise Murat: Home page
Story Type: Feature
ID: 63114
Date Modified: November 16, 2011, 03:45 PM
