Kitchen Design Finished

The kitchen design is finalized. We made the few remaining decisions in-person at the new Pedini showroom in South Lake Union.

First and most important was choosing the finish of the upper cabinets. We wanted something lighter than the dark brown lower cabinets. The section of uppers is small, so we chose something with a bit of contrast. We quickly narrowed our choices to the painted glass finishes. A coat of paint on the back of glass provides some gloss and depth to the color. We settled on Bianco, which (despite the name), isn't white. The paint color is a light grey, and the glass adds just a hint of green to it. It is fairly neutral and matches our other materials well; it is lighter than the other cabinets, but is enough darker than a white wall to stand out nicely. Sadly, we cannot find any photos of the color on Pedini's site.

While we were at the showroom, we noticed they had a sample kitchen with an interesting mechanism for opening the upper cabinets. In the Magika line (which we are using), they have an upward-opening option in addition to traditional side-hinged cabinets. To prevent the upswing doors from running into your head, they are hinged in the middle. The upper half is hinged to the cabinet like expected, but the lower half is hinged inward, so it stays roughly vertical while the door is opened. When fully open, the door is compact and out-of-way, without hitting the ceiling. Particularly for someone tall, this seems like a nice alternative. They cost a bit more, but it is worth it to us. The sample unit they had was equipped with a motorized control, so just a touch would open or close the door. We weren't interested in the extra expense or complexity of the motors, so we chose the manual version.

We discussed several small decisions, mostly about handles. Magika has two handle options: hidden handles inset into the top of each door, accessible via a horizontal channel; and external vertically-oriented handles in aluminum or white. We generally liked the inset handles; they look clean and lack bits to snag on. For the back of the island facing the dining room we considered the aluminum handles for the visual effect. However, the channel for the inset handles adds height to the cabinets, and matching a set of channeled and channel-less cabinets on the two sides of the island would've been tricky.

On the upside, this conversation revealed that using handled cabinets in the bathrooms would lower the height a bit, so we switched those. Back in the kitchen, the cabinet and drawer on the appliance wall can't fit channels, so those require external handles. We spent a while debating which handles to use, and how to position them. We decided to have no holes drilled by the factory, and decide which handles to use and where to put them at installation time.

The fixed, opened shelving was dropped from the order completely. The shelves from Pedini wouldn't exactly match the cabinets, and were fairly expensive for simple shelves. Since we are getting other built-in cabinetry work done in the house, we decided we could get a better result by having those shelves constructed later.

With a few emails for revised diagrams and cost quotes, we now have the kitchen design fully locked.