Architect Christine Matheu transformed her home’s original kitchen without enlarging its footprint.

The Pullman-style kitchen was a painfully narrow space closed off from the rest of the interior, like a shameful secret hidden by a sliding pocket door. A pass-through window between the dining room and kitchen served as a means by which dishes could be transferred conveniently between the two spaces. Inside this workroom, built-in cabinets lined every wall–a model of efficient storage that promised to engender feelings of claustrophobic isolation. A single small window over the sink offered a vista beyond the tasks at hand.”–A description of the kitchen before its transformation, excerpted from Chapter 5 of A Home of Her Own

Christine turned a structural post near the center of the wall between her kitchen and dining room into a dynamic feature of the new design, allowing it to highlight her home’s post-and-beam architecture. She opened up the rest of that wall, turning the once-separate kitchen and dining room into distinct, yet closely related parts of the larger space. Additional windows and skylights illuminate the space and link it visually to its surroundings both within and outside of the house. Cabinetry is faced with Peruvian walnut and maple. A glass backsplash and frosted-glass doors with brushed aluminum frames augment the feeling of great light and open space.

See Brian Coleman’s feature story published originally in Old-House Interiors.

Read more about this kitchen in the feature “Circa 1960 for a Split Level”(Kitchen Classics Magazine, 2011) and in a feature by Carrol Krause in The Herald-Times.

Photography by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography and Design