CLEVER STORAGE, CLEAN LINES, MODERN ADD-ONS IN A VINTAGE SPACE.
By David Lennam | Photos by Jody Beck
How do you keep the chef happy? Simple. Give him a better kitchen.
That’s what a professional couple was thinking when embarking on a renovation of their 1930s Vista Heights bungalow. There were lots of boxes to tick, but “kitchen” was high on the list.
“My husband’s father was a Polish immigrant who was a baker,” the homeowner says, “and my husband has picked up all his dad’s baking recipes. He makes his own bread, bagels and, when he makes homemade soup, he makes his own noodles. He wanted lots of counter space for baking. That was very important to him in the renovation.”
The kitchen they got — thanks to the work of builder Jackson Leidenfrost at HYGGE Design Inc. and the crew at Woodshop 506 — is a sleek, spacious and light-filled room with loads of counter and storage space. It’s also a buffer between the original house and the addition, with flourishes of both: the exposed brick of the old chimney against the bright, open space of the new build.
The kitchen is just part of a reno that doubled the size of this 1,300-square-foot home the family has lived in for a dozen years.
The homeowner likes to refer to the addition as “a modern stack on the back of an old house.” The description fits. Rising off the back corner of the original structure is an ultra-modern, head-turning, three-storey box.
The homeowner laughs at the comment some friends made about the project.
“When I told them about what we were doing they said, ‘Oh, you’re doing a mullet house.’ Apparently, it’s like a party in the back.”
The design was inspired by what she saw while living in England — a culture that values the heritage esthetic, but is unafraid to incorporate modern flourishes.
“They keep their old architecture and don’t tear it down, but often meld modern with old buildings.”
The new kitchen retains some of the character of the house, but offers room enough for several cooks. Where some kitchen do-overs end up cramming too much into a tight fit, this one offers a generous four and a half feet of width between the stove and the island.
“It’s so well designed,” says the homeowner. “We have so much storage space. We could never have imagined having it. I give my husband credit. He really thought about the function of the kitchen.”
The ample island features a Caesarstone quartz countertop that complements the Centura Mallorca backsplash, with its Moroccan-style vertical stack, behind the stove.
Hard-wearing engineered white oak floors match the flat-cut white oak of the custom cabinetry from Woodshop 506 and offer a connection to the oak floors of the existing house.
“We wanted to find something that brought a bit of the old house into the new,” says Leidenfrost. “It blends in nicely, but is still modern and with all the upgrades you’d expect in a new house.”
The kitchen, with its south-facing orientation and abundance of large windows, features a subdued palette and a very Scandinavian flavour. It showcases almost-nine-foot ceilings, but with architecturally interesting cutouts. A dark feature wall of cupboards bookends the facing wall of denim blue/green that invites the eye up two stairs into the spectacular dining room — an extension of the kitchen.
Leidenfrost says, even with the intriguing architecture, the end result was exactly what the homeowner wished for: a big, bright, modern space that blends with the existing house.
“We took a little bit of a different approach with the exterior, going with a very contrasted design on the outside, which I think is very interesting and unique,” he says. “But the big thing we came away with is you can update a space in a very modern way and still have it work with an older house.”
