Rebecca’s Kitchen

We think we’ve made you wait long enough and now it’s finally time to share Rebecca’s jaw dropping kitchen. This kitchen, my friends, is epic. Adam has taken a LOT of images so prepare to get scrolling.

If you’re a long term Rock My Style reader you might remember the kitchen we fitted in our old house? We really loved that kitchen and we were sad to leave it behind… So we actually took our island with us! Ben’s uncle had made it for us and so it had sentimental value attached. (Don’t worry we told the buyers from the start and replaced it with a similar one for them).

Our new house needed the existing 1970s ugly dark kitchen knocking down and extending out the back to create a space that we’d dreamed of. We wanted to bring the house up to modern living with big glass doors at the back opening onto the garden and with lots of velux roof windows to let more light in from above. Our house is a listed building, so after battling our planning department and conservation officers we finally got the go ahead at the end of last year to start our building work and the diggers and builders arrived in December. We boarded up a temporary windowless kitchen and I carted washing round to my mum’s house every week for almost 6 months! We didn’t really mind the destruction and builders dust that much {I only cried twice I think!} because it meant we were one step closer to creating a kitchen we kept dreaming about and finishing the house off.

We learned a lot from recently creating our last kitchen in terms of how we lived and cooked with it, deciding the features we wanted to carry through to the new plans and those we wanted to change. We basically lived in our last kitchen, especially in the summer with the garden, so wanted enough space to have a table and a sofa/TV area in there again. We also love to entertain and host dinner parties too so wanted enough space for this and future Christmas lunches!

Ben’s uncle very kindly agreed to make us another kitchen {we promised that we’d stay in this house this time!} so we designed with him an L shape kitchen around the island with a large house maid’s unit that would sit on top of the worktop to house our toaster/microwave/kettle and big pan drawers, an essential for storage! Colour wise we wanted something a bit different this time so chose Farrow and Ball Skimming Stone for the run of units with Down Pipe for the island all with antique brass hardware {our kitchen maker bought these in Edinburgh and distressed them for us using ammonia}. I fell in love with a tap from Devol for Perrin & Rowe which tied in perfectly. The walls are in Farrow & Ball Wimborne White, an off-white neutral. Ben made the shaker style peg shelf above the sink. My husband and I battled on worktops a little, he wanted all oak whereas I wanted all stone so we compromised. It works really well now though having an oak island top and quartz around the sink/cooker for easy wiping down and no worries about water on the wood.

Above the island we’ve chosen Laura Ashley pendant lights with brass and glass which match the wall lights we’ve fitted either side of the sofa.

Flooring wise we went for a herringbone pattern in solid oak which my husband learned to lay using YouTube videos. More details can be found on my blog, Roses and Rolltops. It was a real labour of love but definitely worth it in the end. We’ve finished it in Osmo Raw Oil to keep the light, scandi kind of look colour. We’ve tried to mix the old and the new, not wanting it to look either too modern or too classic. I hope it works? We’ve got a farmhouse style table which Ben made with scaffold boards mixed with modern Eames Paris style chairs. The posters and hangers are from Desenio, the Swedish poster brand.

I couldn’t decide what to do with the big wall next to the kitchen. I didn’t want to make it too busy with artwork I might get sick of so we collected some vintage mirrors to reflect some of the garden. The battered leather chairs were a last minute buy when the space looked like it could do with something and they were such a great eBay find we picked up from Hove. We sit in them so much. The radiators are reclaimed cast iron traditional rads from Ribble Radiators and I love the extra dimension they give to the room.

As for the rest of the space, we kept the sofa from our last kitchen and jazzed it up with some new cushions, mostly from Cox and Cox. We also put up a gallery wall with differing frames and prints including feathers and a wooden ladder for blankets. I’ve got a thing for vintage pine chest of drawers, they make great display areas as well as being useful for extra storage. Ben made a dresser display unit which I’ve used to store all of our cookbooks. We got limed oak curtain poles from Bunnings {which Ben had to join to span the width of the sliding doors} and had Ikea curtains adjusted slightly {they had a green stripe on that we had removed and joined a few pairs together} so that we can shut the dark out when the winter arrives. Since finishing the kitchen we haven’t sat in our lounge once! We’re really happy with the space and the way it’s all turned out. The building work and dust and stress was definitely worth it in the end.