Kitchen Clarity Adventures in Kitchen and Bath Design

There were some gorgeous kitchens featured on Desire to Inspire yesterday – the work of photographer Susan Gilmore.  I wish I knew who the kitchen designer is:

Photo Susan Gilmore via Desire to Inspire

This kitchen does a brilliant job of mixing contemporary and traditional elements to create a space that is completely current.  A great balance of warm and cool, old and new, practicality and whimsy – I’m loving the rainbow stools and the scalloped trim at hood and island.  True timelessness is difficult to achieve, but this must be pretty close to it, in a totally post-modern way.

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Have you registered for the Aga Great Escape contest yet? The prize, sadly, is not an Aga cooker, but you could win a three-day, all-expense-paid trip for two to the  Carolinas and Georgia, including cooking classes, home tours and lunch with a celebrity cookbook author. To enter, you just have to fill out a contest entry online and attend an AGA Cooker Demonstration at an Aga dealership in your area by Oct. 31, 2010.

Aga Cooker

Even if you don’t win the contest, you get to learn about Aga cooking,and sample some fabulous food – how could that hurt? Read the full press release here. Enter the Great Escape Contest and register for your cooking demo  here.

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Well, just downstairs, really. Kitchens are  so often part of open and connected living spaces these days. In older homes, this often means walls have to be removed, and new connections created between areas that were previously separate. Removing the traditional hallway and allowing the staircase to become part of the kitchen makes great use of available space, and creates some surprising and interesting volumes:

Tucked under - via Colour Me Happy

Traditional style, non-traditional layout - via Marie Claire Maison (I think)

A rustic loft? - via Skona Hem

Open spaces - Tim Bjorn via Desire to Inspire

Using every inch in this Cape Town Loft - via Desire to Inspire

Is the traditional enclosed staircase a thing of the past? Without modern heating and insulation, these open layouts could be horribly drafty – the separated, smaller spaces would have been much easier to keep warm. We have become used to the luxury of keeping the whole house at a comfortable temperature all year round. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how much building technology has changed the way we live our lives?

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An unusual job opening caught my eye in this weekend – I think I’ve mentioned before that as a child my ambition was to be a lighthouse keeper (probably an escape fantasy spawned by being part of a large, close-in-age family), so the idea of manning the historical East Brother Light Station in San Francisco Bay is certainly tempting:

East Brother Light Station

The lighthouses of my childhood imagination looked more like the Eddystone:

Eddystone Light - Engraving of 1829

- or the Fastnet Rock:

Fastnet Light - Photo Peter Cox

But in the real world, East Brother, with its Victorian details – scrollwork, gingerbread, porches and balconies – and only 10 minutes by boat from the shore – would be a much mellower choice. A much mellower climate too, with the Point Richmond area being one of San Francisco Bay’s banana belts.

East Brother Island via boatingsf.com

The 1874 light station is run by its preservation society as a bed and breakfast, so you don’t have to apply for the job in order to enjoy its romantic Victorian charm for a day:

Some of the bedrooms at East Brother Light Station

The dining room

The job opening (via San Francisco Chronicle Aug 28 2010 downloadable application here ) is for a couple to run the bed and breakfast, shop for all the supplies, ferry guests back and forth, keep the Fresnel light and foghorn working, and do all the paperwork for the business. A Coastguard Captain’s license is required, as well as the hospitality and gourmet cooking skills to cater for the guests. A tall order indeed! Perhaps life on the Eddystone would actually be easier?

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There’s nothing quite like a real shower out in the open (and I don’t mean the rainy kind):

Outdoor shower in Mauritius via Frank Features

Outdoor shower via Frank Features

Outdoor laundry is good, too, and good for the planet:

Photo Pia Ulin

I’ll volunteer to watch it drying, if you like.

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Whew, it’s a little cooler here today. Sad, really, that our first really hot spell of the summer chose to coincide exactly with “back-to-school” time. It doesn’t seem quite fair that the poor kids have to go back before Labor Day, does it?  If you are still sweltering, here’s a fun kitchen image to cool you down:

Adam Swanson adimpossible.blogspot.com

You can commission the artist, Adam, to paint a custom portrait of your bicycle for a mere $200 – I wonder if he’d be willing to branch out to kitchens?

No time for a serious post today – just waved my East coast college kid off at the airport, so I was touched by this post on Dominique Browning’s Slow Love Life blog today. I always hated the back-to-school season, with the return of the children’s deadlines and homework and rushed mornings to add to my own. Now they pack up and leave, and my schedule actually gets easier – but I still don’t really like it, and I still find it hard to believe my child can really successfully cross the country alone, despite  the evidence.

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I learned a new word today – muratura.  Well, OK, muratura is Italian for masonry, so if I was fluent in Italian, it would not be nearly so new.  Such a lovely word to describe this traditional kitchen style, where the cupboards, drawers and shelves are set into masonry elements, sometimes decorated with ceramic tile, and sometimes simply plastered or painted:

via biessearradamenti.it

Casa Felice

Design Katia Abete via digsdigs

Not what we typically have in mind when we think of Italian kitchen design, is it? Or is it?

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