Custom Cabinets & General Construction in Weston, CT

What we did here

This one started with nothing on the walls. The room was finished, painted and lit, the herringbone floor was already down, and that was it. One long open space with windows on two sides and no kitchen in it yet.

That is the easiest kind of job to get wrong. With no walls dictating anything, a kitchen this size can end up as a row of cabinets stuck along the edges with a lot of empty floor in the middle. So the room got planned around the island first, and everything else was set out from there.

The perimeter cabinets are painted and they go all the way to the ceiling. No gap on top, no dust shelf, and the crown lands on the cabinet instead of floating above it. In a room with ceilings this high, stopping the uppers short would have left a stripe of blank wall over every run.

The island is the only wood in the room. Everything else is painted, so the island reads as a piece of furniture rather than more cabinetry, and it picks up the tone of the floor underneath it. It is long enough to work at from both sides without anyone getting in the way.

The counters and the backsplash are the same veined stone, and behind the range it runs full height up to the hood instead of stopping at a ledge. That is one of those decisions that costs more at the time and then stops mattering, because you never look at that wall again and think something is missing.

The upper cabinets are not all solid. Some have glass fronts and there are open wood shelves between them, which breaks up what would otherwise be a very long stretch of painted doors. The refrigerator is full height with cabinet fronts on it, so it disappears into the run. There is a pot filler over the range.

Off the kitchen there is a bar run: painted uppers, the same stone on the counter and the wall behind it, drawers below and a wine refrigerator built in. Same cabinets, same stone, so it reads as part of the kitchen and not as something added later.