Catherine Place
A hand-painted in-frame kitchen in the lower ground floor of a Westminster townhouse, with a curved walnut breakfast bar worked into the island and every appliance taken into the joinery.
A basement, worked long
A basement kitchen in a terraced townhouse, which is the hardest place to put one. There is one window, the ceiling is low, and everything has to be reached from a single corridor. The answer was to run the perimeter in dark stone against a white tiled wall and keep every tall element to one side, so the room reads as long rather than tight. The island carries the cooktop and the preparation; its end swells into a curved solid walnut breakfast bar, thicker than the stone and set slightly lower, so it is a table rather than an extension of the countertop.
Taking the appliances in
A refrigerator, a freezer and a wine cabinet sit in one bank of full-height painted joinery, framed as cupboards rather than left standing in a gap. That is more work than it looks: the frames have to be set out around the appliance carcass and its service clearances before anything is machined, and the doors either side have to line through with the appliance doors, not with each other.
The same construction, whichever range
The range decides the door and the ornament. Everything behind it is built the same way, in the same building, by the same nine people — and it is built that way whether the kitchen is going to Suffolk or to Connecticut.
What a kitchen costs, and why → How a commission runs → How it reaches you →
Specification
| Setting out | Drawn in CAD, then again at full size as a rod pinned above the bench. Machining is taken from the rod, not the screen. |
|---|---|
| Carcass | 18mm birch-faced plywood (a shade under 3/4 inch), glued and screwed, 9mm backs (just under 3/8 inch) housed in rather than pinned on. Adjustable feet throughout. |
| Face frames | Solid timber, mortise and tenon, with scribed filler stiles where the joinery meets the building. |
| Drawer boxes | Solid European oak, 16mm (just over 5/8 inch) sides, through-dovetailed front and back by hand, waxed. |
| Runners | Full-extension soft-close, rated to 90lb. |
| Painted work | Four coats, brushed by hand in our own finishing room, with the final coat cut in on site after installation. |
| Installation | By the people who made it. Nothing is subcontracted and nothing arrives flat-packed. |
Every kitchen on this site is one we have made. The images are visualizations rather than photographs of our clients’ houses. They are built from our own workshop drawings and our own photographs of the work on site, and finished with AI, because our clients ask that their houses are not photographed or published. None of it is stock imagery and none of it is somebody else’s work. Drawings, samples and references for completed commissions we will show you in person — visits to the Mickfield workshop are by appointment.
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Tell us about the room.
Where the house is, roughly when you would like to be cooking in it, and what you have in mind. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
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