Kitchen of the Week: Style Trumps Ease in a San Francisco Loft
If this homeowner wants a bowl of cereal, he must first lift a 40-pound steel ladder into place and climb up several feet to a cabinet where he stores his dry goods. The desire to preserve large windows and the lack of available wall space prevented more accessible storage. But that didn’t matter for the homeowner, a San Francisco tech CEO who enjoys exercising and doesn’t mind the extra lifting. He sees it as a minor sacrifice in the name of creating a knockout focal point in the industrial loft setting. “It was really all about the look,” says Cindy Bayon of Muratore Construction + Design, who designed and built the almost entirely custom kitchen. “OK, in hindsight there should have been wheels on the ladder.”
Location: San Francisco
Size: The entire loft is 1,400 square feet.
Steel is the kitchen’s main ingredient, cladding the nearly floor-to-ceiling cabinets, the massive island and even portions of the redwood structural posts. Its rawness fits well with the former early-1900s lithograph-warehouse setting and lends an edge that seems to permeate the entire project.
The original kitchen sat tucked underneath the loft seen on the left here; it was a dark and uneventful space. Bayon and the homeowner brought everything over to the double-height, brick-walled former living room, where large windows bring in lots of natural light. (The living room is now where the kitchen used to be.)
They wanted to get everything on the one wall, so the two brick columns basically were all they had to work with. Tall appliances, like the refrigerator, wine fridge and double stacked ovens, took up most of the available space, so the upper cabinet “bridge” storage was left for the pantry and extra dishware. Given the height of the loft, though, the tall cabinets helped cut down visually on the void.
Kitchen of the Week: Style Trumps Ease in a San Francisco Loft
