Contemporary Colonial Kitchen

Hi everyone! It’s been almost a month since I posted on here - I’ve been scrambling between my new day job and gathering fun things to share on Enchanted Home. My goal has always been to provide interesting, relevant, and sought after information here on the good old internet, and sometimes it takes a while to really piece things together. While we’re on the subject of piecing things together, that is exactly what has been happening in our home the past few weeks! We’re juggling about four different projects (the guest room, staircase, den, and exterior are all “in process”) and seem to be making almost no progress on them. The joys of homeownership.

Today I want to share a room in our house that is approximately halfway done. This way we can appreciate how far we’ve come, and understand how far we have to go! I want to share our exciting plans and why we’re changing certain aspects. Without further adieu, here is our contemporary colonial kitchen!

I figured I would begin with our shining star - the Jamestown Kitchen Island by Vintage Millwerks. They are a California based furniture company that handcrafts each and every one of their pieces from solid wood. It’s an absolute dream! We couldn’t be happier with the craftsmanship, the design, and the beautiful natural wax finish that will lend itself to the sweetest patina (for those of you who aren’t privy to the term, patina is the natural aging of a material that happens with time and use). It seems like aged furniture and patinas are coming into the design spotlight recently, which makes me so excited! When your piece has lived a good life, it will have a lovely character full of memories and stories. A nick in the wood here from a wild night of chopping, and a faded stain where you accidentally left some blueberries out a little too long. No one else will ever have that same exact piece, and that’s what makes it so special.

Out of everything we’ve done so far in this room, we get the most comments on the paint colors. Some perceive the walls as navy or a dark green, but they are 100% black. Call me crazy, but a black, moody kitchen has always been on my wish list. We used Iron Ore from Sherwin Williams on the walls, and Downing Earth (also SW) on the cabinets. I’ll do a separate post someday on how we painted our cabinets… I promise it is not as difficult as it seems! If you want to know how I picked the colors, buckle your seatbelts: I actually chose them because of their names! The good people out there naming paint colors are incredibly talented. You’ll hear me say time and time again that design is about a feeling. The names of paint colors always evoke something in us. Iron Ore just spoke to me. It felt like it had this old world quality, like it was tough and weathered but uniquely homey. Downing Earth seemed like the perfect balance - soft and delicate, full of the possibility of life just beneath the surface. I can almost smell the woods sometimes when I look at it!

The small details matter in a kitchen, more than many other rooms in the house. The hardware, lighting, cooking tools, and accessories all provide opportunities to create a harmonious whole. Because we spent about $2,500 on the kitchen island, we didn’t have much left over for the little things. We turned to Wayfair (really not my favorite, but will do on a tight budget) for the cabinet hardware, which I’ll link down at the bottom of this post. Our wood bowl was actually an engagement gift from a sweet friend, and it’s always filled with fruit we don’t eat. The gorgeous oil painting was actually done by my grandfather, an incredibly talented local artist and genuinely beautiful soul. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few of his paintings, and it’s such a nice way to make it feel like he’s still with us. He’s in so many of my early childhood memories, especially in the kitchen. He is the reason I’m obsessed with PB&J’s, so it only fits that something of his is with me every time I make one.

Unfortunately, this is where we end the fun part of the tour. The view from the other side of the kitchen is abysmal. Our early 2000’s appliances haunt our dreams. We’re so desperate to get rid of them, we’ve already picked out their replacements! Just waiting for the sad day they finally die (sarcasm). In my wildest dreams, we would remove the microwave over the stove and replace it with a gorgeous hood. The fridge should move over to the other side of the room, since it pretty much couldn’t be in a worse location. It’s the first thing you see when you enter from the back of the house. Very unattractive.

But the next step for us likely involves the countertops and sink. We’re going to replace the icky solid surface countertop with butcher’s block, ditch the old, stained sink in favor of something black, find the perfect facet, and install a textural backsplash. I plan on hanging up another cheese board on the wall and hopefully a couple of sconces for extra mood lighting. Eventually, we’ll be ripping up (or laying over) the nasty linoleum floor. A small-scale black and white tile floor seems like just the thing.

All in all, I think we have come pretty far from the kitchen we had when we moved in a year ago. I love the way the black paint turned that country kitchen into a deep, moody, mysterious place to prepare our meals. Sometimes I like to pretend I’m a 19th century housewife, when times were a little bit simpler and home cooking was a heck of a lot better (read: had a lot more butter in it).

Until next time,

Nicki