Kitchen
Cottonwood Rd. — Wellesley
New island, panel-ready appliances, and relocated plumbing. Homeowners stayed in place through a four-week scope.
121B Tremont St., Suite 24, Boston, MA 02135(617) 397-5158
Beaconsfield Rd. has a brick chimney chase running right through the middle of the old kitchen. Three designers before us had told the owners it had to come out. We kept it. It carries a working flue on the first floor and a liner for the basement boiler, and the cost to re-route both was more than the design work to build around it.
We framed the chase into a new pantry column at one end of the kitchen and ran cabinets up to it on both sides. Inset cabinets from a New England cabinet line in a warm off-white, with a custom hood surround trimmed to match the upper run. Counters are a honed Virginia Mist soapstone — denser than the usual soapstone, which matters when you leave a Dutch oven on it.
The homeowner wanted a freestanding range, so we pulled the range wall forward six inches to get the hood vent up cleanly through the second-floor closet. The chase pantry ended up being the most-used spot in the kitchen. Owners called it the best change anyone had ever suggested.
“Our chimney chase made the layout tricky. They reworked it around the existing flue, used inset cabinets, and built a custom hood surround that sits flush with the wall.”
