• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Alice Dishes

Design and Lifestyle

  • Design
  • Life
  • Recipes
  • Reviews
  • Travel
Victorian contemporary kitchen

August 30, 2021

Kitchen. Cucina. Cuisine. Cocina.

My favorite room in any building is the kitchen. My favorite word in any language is “kitchen”. My favorite place to eat is the kitchen. My favorite place to hangout is the kitchen. Are you getting the picture? I love kitchens.

No doubt the reason for this is the fact that I grew up in a family where the kitchen was the beating heart of our home. Everything happened in the kitchen. Of course, we cooked there. We ate there. We kept our dogs there. We had grand arguments there. We talked on the phone there. (It hung on the wall and had a long cord). We put the world to rights there. And so for me, a home is not a home, until the kitchen is just so.

Updating a Victorian Kitchen

If you’re lucky enough to have lived in a Victorian property, you’ll know that when the house was originally built the idea was to hide the kitchen away so the cook and her assistants could keep out of sight while they fed their Master and Mistress. Of course, today’s lifestyles are rather different and integrating our cooking, eating and living spaces into one open floor plan is what is desired. That means re-thinking the internal layout of a period home.

One of the things that Europeans have really mastered is updating period buildings to make them work better for modern-day life, all without losing the soul and beauty of the original design. My last home was a 1908 Victorian and when we moved in, the kitchen left a lot to be desired (see below). It was tucked away at the back of the house and had been partially updated, but wasn’t very functional.

  • Victorian kitchen needing remodel
    Old kitchen ripe for a remodel

With a little bit of imagination we kept what was great about the space, and hugely improved the flow and efficiency of the kitchen by giving it an open-plan feel and connecting it to the dining room by widening the opening. We eliminated a coat closet in the hallway so we could walk into the kitchen from the hallway, vs. always have to walk through the dining room. We added a ton of storage and work space with the new walnut island, and upgraded the lighting with recessed spots and eye-catching pendants.

The same Victorian kitchen reimagined for modern family living.

Remodeling a kitchen is never easy, it seems like there are a million details to consider, let alone ensuring you have a spot for all your gadgets, tools, pots, pans, plates and glasses. If you need help, reach out! [email protected]

Contact Alice

    Filed Under: Design Tagged With: kitchen design, remodel, Victorian house

    Reader Interactions

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Primary Sidebar

    alice chan headshot

    About Alice

    I grew up with parents who had distinct and definitive design sensibilities. There was always some kind of DIY project going on at home. Whether my dad was hanging Laura Ashley wallpaper, or my mum was picking out colored cabinets for our kitchen—dark green paneling as I recall—it was impossible not to absorb some of their passion and interest in interiors as I developed my own personal style. Fast forward many decades later, and I have remodeled a number of my own homes, tweaked interiors, and put together seemingly incompatible patterns, colors, and textures. And now I want to do this for others. I take my main inspiration from the interior and exterior environments that envelop a space. If you listen closely, a room will “tell you” what will work best to create a stunning, yet comfortable place to be.

    Footer

    A bit about me... I grew up in the UK and moved to Northern California in the late 1990s, drawn here, like so many others, by the lure of the dot.com ...

    Read More

    More to Explore

    All Posts Archive

    Stay Connected

    • Email
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • RSS
    • Twitter

    Never Miss a Post

    Copyright© 2022 · Alice Dishes

    website by lobstervine