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	Photo: Deborah Sherman

5 Chic Kitchens

Inviting Rooms for Living and Entertaining

    It’s said that no matter where or how you entertain, everyone always ends up in the kitchen. In these five Alameda kitchen remodels, that seemed to be the theme when the homeowners envisioned their new spaces. Rather than focusing on gizmos or having the latest top-end appliances, these owners thought about warmth     and comfort, striving to create a place where everyone wants to end up.
    They also considered the environment, choosing such “green’’ materials as recycled wood, Marmoleum flooring, high-efficiency appliances and manufactured countertops.
    A room is always about the people, says Laurie Ricksecker-Heaps, a professional interior designer who recently remodeled her own Alameda kitchen.
    “A design should not look like there was a designer,’’ she says. “You don’t want to walk in and think, ‘Oh, did Laurie and Natalie [Langdon-Gionet, a fellow designer] do this?’ It should feel like the person.’’

Warm and Welcoming

    Warm comes to mind when you walk into Monica Hove’s kitchen, with its long center island and stunning vertical-grain fir cabinets with a conversion varnish. The rich Spanish red on the walls stands out against the tan, tumbled-marble mosaic tile on the backsplash, and the light CesarStone counters (which,        Hove points out, carry a high environmental rating). Sleek stainless steel appliances—all energy efficient—contrast with the ethnic art, including an Indonesian-style woodcarving and Native American totem pole visible through the French doors to the garden.
    Hove likes to show her specially designed cookbook holder, an overhead cabinet that pulls out to reveal a bookshelf. Pretty soon she hopes to add a laptop to her cooking gear. “The Internet is a great source of cooking information,’’ she says.
    The new kitchen is a actually a reface of a design she already loved for its open and inviting feel and flow to the lush garden Hove carefully tends. She wanted something grandson-friendly (there’s a special nook for toys). “We pretty much live in this room,’’ Hove says. “We wanted it to be welcoming.’’

Casual Craftsman

    Anne Van Dine learned to cook from her  Italian grandparents, and she has been a food stylist and owned a catering business. But when it came to designing a new kitchen for her East End Craftsman home, the chef gave way to the mom of an adolescent daughter, and to the husband, Jim, to create an inviting space for family and teenagers.
    They opened up a galley kitchen to overlook a spacious nook and casual TV room. In a design that is both stylish and unpretentious, they chose oak Shaker-style cabinets with pewter cup pulls and stained-glass door accents and light fixtures true to the period of the house. The Silestone countertop, with a mauve-and-brown speckled pattern that reminds Anne Van Dine of chocolate-chip cookie dough, provides a modern, durable surface with a vintage look.
    In a few concessions to the chef, Anne Van Dine chose a duel-fuel Thermador range, replacing a giant professional Wolf (a firehouse original) with pilot lights that heated the whole room. She also favors the streamline formation of a professional kitchen (the refrigerator and sink are at opposite ends of the room) over the traditional design that puts stove, sink and refrigerator in a close triangle. It all adds up to the perfect work area for Anne Van Dine’s current job: short-order cook for her daughter and friends who love to congregate there. “All I’m missing is one of those things where I can clip up their orders,’’ she says.

Colorful Colonial

    In their period kitchen remodel, Hale and Beth Foote wanted to remain true to their 1917 shingled Dutch Colonial, keeping the oddball things common in old houses, like a small window high on one wall that many people would likely cover with a cabinet. Hale Foote admits it’s quirky and asymmetrical, characteristics that also make the room functional and fun to be in. “Quirky is OK,’’ he says. “We tried to be restrained. We didn’t want anything too showy. We cook and eat here. We have kids. We wanted to have a family kitchen.’’
    For the floor, the Footes chose vintage-looking Marmoleum, an eco-friendly surface that weathers three kids well, and they used stained cherry cabinets with some white-painted doors along one wall to tie in with the original butler’s pantry. Cooking enthusiasts, they installed two ovens and an extra sink (for icing drinks at their annual Fourth of July party, a mandatory event for Grand Street residents). The colors, tile and countertops boost the early-century feel: sage-green walls in the main kitchen and wainscoting in the breakfast nook, painted a warm terra cotta; butter-yellow tile on the backsplash with accents depicting redwoods, poppies, the Sierra and other things California; and honed black-granite counters.
    While everyone thinks the built-in spice rack next to the stove is a quirky original, it was carefully designed into the remodel. “We just told the carpenter we needed a bottom shelf big enough for a bottle of Tabasco and deep enough for a box of salt,’’ Louisiana-native Hale Foote says. “We use a lot of Tabasco.’’

Visual Interest

    The most spectacular element in Laurie and Barry Bochner’s new kitchen came out of one of those compromises couples make on a remodel. Barry Bochner didn’t like glass tiles, which Laurie Bochner wanted for the backsplash. So they went with stainless steel in a herringbone pattern, which Laurie Bochner finds eye-catching, versatile and subdued, all at the same time. Stainless goes with everything, she notes, including when she decides to change colors. “I like a really clean line,’’ she says. “This allowed me to have a pretty clean line but be decorative in an unusual way.’’
    The backsplash pairs nicely with ash cabinetry and light cherry stain. In yet another nod to the planet, she chose Zodiaq countertops, a durable quartz material that doesn’t require the solvents used to seal granite. Despite her love of clean lines, the kitchen remodel is part of the couple’s effort to update their 25-year-old Harbor Bay home and soften the rectangles so common in tract houses. They added a rounded bay window in the dining room in the first phase of the remodel. Bochner now has a curved kitchen-counter bar to mimic the window, adding three short decorative posts that appear to hold up the counter, with a black wooden ball accenting each. It was something she saw in a design magazine. “I wanted to put something visually interesting there,’’ she says. “A long rectangular bar would look dull.’’
    The remodel also added 4 feet to the width of the kitchen and gave the couple easier access to the appliances and cabinets. “The tone of the kitchen is very relaxing,’’ she says, describing why she likes the redo. “I can’t say I cook more, but it’s just a place I enjoy spending time in.’’

Country Revival

    When interior designer Laurie Ricksecker-Heaps set out to tackle her own kitchen, part of a head-to-toe remodel of a 109-year-old Colonial Revival in the Gold Coast, she had a tall order for herself: something cozy and lived in that could also host their community events, which sometimes draw as many as 300 people. “I wanted a European feel without a date or an era,’’ she says. “We wanted a house we could fill up with our friends.’’
    The result is what she calls an “unfitted’’ kitchen from the days before everything was built in. There are no upper cabinets (19th-century homes didn’t have them), and the lower cabinets and island were made to look like stand-alone furniture. European touches are everywhere, starting with the limestone tile floor in a Versailles pattern, and massive exposed-wood ceiling beams reminiscent of a French country home. The enormous space—1,000 square feet with the adjoining family room—has cabinets of heavily distressed stained maple, a plaster hood over an eight-burner range and three different countertop surfaces: antiqued marble, limestone and concrete. What looks like an authentic butler’s pantry was constructed new in an area that was once the servants’ staircase. And the room centers around an 1800s Irish hutch, Ricksecker-Heaps’ first purchase after the family lost everything in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire. The piece symbolizes starting over.
    Ricksecker-Heaps loves to share the story of two wooden columns, connecting wall to beam, that they found in the basement holding up the house. The previous owner says they were once part of a ship’s mast. The reused materials connect the old house with the new design. “I really wanted people to not be sure what we had done,’’ she says.