slhl BEFORE & AFTER

Island Required By Melissa Mauzy Photography courtesy of Gegg Design & Cabinetry

Too narrow for a center island, a dated 1980s kitchen was creatively reconfigured to improve flow and functionality. Seated at the peninsula in her tired, dated kitchen, a Ladue homeowner wistfully envisioned her family and friends gathered around a center island while she prepared delicious meals and snacks. While her current kitchen wasn’t necessarily small, it was narrow, making it nearly impossible to add a center island that was the appropriate size for seating and aisle space. A peninsula extending from one wall provided seating, but it cut off the flow to the breakfast room and doors to the home’s exquisite backyard patio and pool. With an island in mind, the homeowner and her husband enlisted the help of kitchen designer Keith Gegg, Gegg Design & Cabinetry, in collaboration with Mainline Group Architecture and PK Construction, to craft the kitchen of her dreams. After exploring many design ideas, the group determined that the best option would be steal 30” from the adjacent dining room, adding enough width to the kitchen for the

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homeowner’s island. Moving the dining room wall required extra thought and planning, as this was a structural wall. “We had to allow for a place to ‘hide’ a structural beam,” Gegg explains. “We designed pilasters flanking the cabinets and built-in refrigerator to conceal steel columns, and then a short steel beam was hidden within the crown detail of the cabinets.” To gain even more space, three existing closets were removed, enlarging the breakfast room. To compensate for the lost storage, a mini mudroom was built from 3 ½’ taken from the oversized garage. The creation of the mudroom provided two design solutions. First, it gave the homeowners much-needed storage space. Second, adding the mudroom created a small entry from the garage, so that family and guests were not entering directly into the kitchen from the garage. "The space was challenging because the exterior door to the driveway was breaking up the flow of the kitchen," says

JAN/FEB 2015 STLOUISHOMESMAG.COM

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12/9/14 1:49:28 PM