3 Smart Kitchens

	Photo: Deborah Sherman and Paul Dyer

    No man or woman is an island, though it certainly helps to have an ample one in the kitchen. This much the owners of our three favorite Alameda kitchen remodels have found, centering their renovations on marbled and butcher block–style isles to fashion an arresting focal point and to provide a way for more than one cook to work together and mingle with guests.
    A mindful use of space—inviting in light and air while giving the kitchen its due as a home’s epicenter, the spot where everyone can find sustenance and gather for celebrations—also unifies these redesigns, which are notable for the ways they stylistically play off their adjoining older rooms and their owners’ pursuits and collections. Creating a kitchen designed to truly unleash one’s inner chef, with ample room for friends or family, is the ultimate challenge—something these intrepid souls rose to, often taking matters into their own hand.

Waterside Retreat

    Sunlight and an enchanting view of estuary waters mark Pat Plowman’s redesign. Her new kitchen’s spacious L-shaped island, topped by New Century black-and-green-streaked marble, floats beneath a high, asymmetrical roofline. The island also provides a home for a compact glass-faced refrigerator housing choice bottles of reds and whites—essential because Plowman works in the wine industry as a manufacturer’s rep. Cherry cabinets by Kitchens Unlimited in Walnut Creek bookend sleek stainless steel Thermador appliances that rest atop expanses of quarter-sawn red-oak flooring. Skylights punctuate the ceiling as the open kitchen layout eases gracefully into a dining area, where three large windows overlook the water and French doors lead out to a deck.
    The stunning effect was well worth the effort, says Plowman, who spent three years on the project, getting approval for her renovation from the city of Alameda and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Her dream was to add 1,000 square feet to the guest cottage that her grandmother, Alameda High and Lincoln Middle School teacher Jessie Plowman, constructed, along with the larger home that faces the street, in 1932 on onetime dairy land. Jessie Plowman “was one of the first people to buy land and build” in the area, recalls her granddaughter. “I’m probably the last family that’s an original owner in the whole Fernside District on the waterfront.”
    Plowman took an active role in the design of her new two-story addition, absorbing two semesters of architecture night classes in order to read the plans. Working with her architect Wil Harrison, she sought to create a huge kitchen and a great room for entertaining as well as a place to simply watch TV (“Before, I was watching TV on my lap in my bedroom”). Plowman also wanted to integrate original bungalow elements, such as the dwelling’s distinctive door arches, into the new room’s decor.
    Would her grandmother have approved? “I think she’d be thrilled,” Plowman says. “She loved to cook and entertain, and at the time, this house was very suitable for her. I’m sure she would have loved it.”

Designer: Lisa Cannelora

Architect: Wil Harrison

Contractor: Hans Construction

Retro-Contemporary Craftsman

    It doesn’t take much to trigger an inspired kitchen. In Debbie Mumma’s case, one treasured antique—an oak ice chest of indeterminate origin, bequeathed by her parents and driven across the country two decades ago—laid the blueprint for her warm, retro-inspired, user-friendly kitchen. Despite her love of antiques and a sizable collection of Mission furniture and objets d’art, Mumma knew her handsome gray 1912 two-story Craftsman—once the home of the Tucker family of Tucker’s ice cream fame and a stop on local historic home tours—needed a serious update. The old kitchen was cramped, dark and a messy blend of 1930s-style scalloped cornice board and jarring mid-century drawer pulls and light fixtures. Worse, it was only accessible by way of a few stairs leading from the foyer that rose and then fell again. “It was like being on a StairMaster every time you went into the kitchen,” she marvels.
    Tearing down the walls between the kitchen and the old mud and laundry rooms, Mumma added precious space. Beside a breakfast nook, French doors lead to a small deck and a newly landscaped backyard. The luxury of space allowed for two sinks: a large one near the window and a smaller one on the marble-topped island. Mumma designed the quarter-sawn oak cabinets herself; they hide the microwave and the slide-out drawers organizing cutting boards and other cooking essentials. She also came up with the cabinets’ whimsical Craftsman-inspired legs and had them built by Kizanis Custom Cabinets in San Leandro. And she made sure that the border etched into the new floor harmonized with that of the original hardwood borders in the rest of the house.
    The room’s most unique touches, however, are the heavy, lock-like pulls that boldly embellish the ice chest. Mumma had them specially replicated by a Virginia blacksmith, and they are wittily embedded, with satisfying heft, in the cabinets cloaking the refrigerator. “I wanted to make the refrigerator look like an old icebox,” she explains. Meanwhile her beloved ice chest has a place of honor in the kitchen it sparked, against its own nooked-in wall.

Architect: Italo Calpestri

Contractor: Walker Construction

Quirky, Playful and Eco-Cool

    Even the smallest detail sings a funky, distinctive tune of its own in architect David Burton’s kitchen, rendered in the eco-friendly key of reclaimed and/or sustainable materials. Take, for instance, the economically repurposed dusty cocoa Heath ceramic tile seconds that Burton and his wife, Jordan Battani, picked up for pennies and pieced together as a backsplash. “We ended up having just barely enough!” Burton exclaims. “Luckily she had bought some small ones, so we came up with a playful design for the smaller tiles.”
    Burton had his work cut out for him in transforming the south-side “mystery” room in his two-story 1908 craftsman into the chicly modern yet cozy kitchen. The rest of the residence had been given a ghastly 1979 Brady Bunch makeover, as he puts it, complete with dark chocolate shag carpeting, when his family moved from Oakland’s Glenview neighborhood in 2001 to carve out more space for Battani’s aging mother, who had moved in with them. Part of the plan was to redo the old kitchen as an efficiency apartment for her and to makeover the “mystery” room as a sunny gathering place for the family, with access to the side yard.
    Burton tore down a laundry porch, creating a deck made of sustainably harvested and durable redwood, lined with a low rail where guests can sit and talk, through floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, with whoever is cooking in the kitchen. “The idea with this was to make it as indoor-outdoor as possible,” Burton explains. A playful lobster painting by Steven Keene lends an antic air to a sole acid-green wall between the deck and a wall of bookcases collecting cheery cookbooks. Below the well-used volumes are shallow cherry cabinets by City Cabinetmakers, and a Dacor cooktop on the butcher-block island finds plenty of use. Rapidly renewable cork was laid as flooring, and highly energy-efficient windows replaced small, aluminum windows. Skylights add further shine, with extra benefits: Those in the second-floor master bedroom can peer down from the balcony to see who’s in the kitchen. “It’s kind of fun that you can peek from one part of the house to another part of the house,” says Burton with a chuckle. Like the green wall, it’s just another “chance to do something playful.”

Architect and designer: David Burton

Contractor: Master Builders