The Kent Coast Kitchen

A much loved home, a nest where a couple have nurtured their three children – memories collected, milestones celebrated. The time had come to give the house a little love, including a rejig of the ground floor to improve the layout for family life. 

The kitchen’s location was not quite right, tucked away in a small separate room, so moving it was a priority. One of our client’s wishes for the new configuration was to forge a connection with the garden, so doors replaced windows at one end of the relocated galley kitchen. 

A wall was knocked through to create a room that brings the family together with the kitchen, a dining table and sofa here too. There is a natural flow, the family’s familiarity with the house helped inform the design. 

Another big decision was to expose the brick of the chimney breast. This pays homage to the building’s bones, revealing the work by Victorian craftsmen and women, not an intricate, decadent or opulent craft but the physical, raw beauty of handmade bricks and how they are laid. The texture, the mottled terracotta and pinks, like an abstract canvas.

The first visit to Pluck HQ informed much of this design. Our clients were set on London Plane cupboards with a wall of glazed cabinets above after seeing the show kitchen. The Pluck palette includes THREE pinks – Ruskin Blossom the main hue, Raspberry internals for the glass fronted cabinets and a cheeky moment of coral Ritzy in the larder, a piece of storage that it is not an exaggeration to say revolutionises food storage if you have not had one before.

The wall colour is Little Greene’s Mushroom, a ‘classic neutral’ says the paint company with a hint of warmth – tonally the shade harmonises wonderfully with the Ruskin Blossom – very much credit to our creative clients for this fabulous pairing! 

This new kitchen has of course had a huge impact on how this family lives, reinvigorating their home and creating a room that enables them to come together, each occupied by different activities but sharing a space – very much a modern kitchen – how families live now in old houses.