Design : The Pace-Setting California Kitchen : Five Designers Tell How to Make a Complex Room Really Work

The kitchen always has been the heart and soul of the American home, although today’s kitchens are designed for more than just the obvious tasks of cooking and eating. Kitchens now incorporate such facilities as preparation and cooking islands, greenhouse windows, laundry rooms, family rooms, media centers, mini-offices and conversation and game areas.

And in the design world, it’s the Southern California kitchen that is setting the pace for the country. Why is the California kitchen being emulated? What makes our kitchens unique?

We asked several local design experts to show us kitchens they have recently completed and to tell us about their design philosophies.

DeWitt Talmadge Beall, an affiliate of A.S.I.D., is a unique design professional who has been working exclusively on kitchens since 1980. His father was in the kitchen business in West Virginia, so he has been influenced by kitchens and their designs most of his life.

“The kitchen is the most complex room in the house, the busiest in most homes, and the one that wears out,” the Los Angeles designer says. “Likely the kitchen was not really designed to begin with, beyond saying that the sink should go under the window. Kitchen design is a fairly recent phenomenon. Nothing about the way we live has changed so much as the way we work in a kitchen.

“Though we might want a kitchen to look as it might have looked in the 18th Century, its style and function are inseparable in kitchen design,” Beall said. “It has to work for our eyes, as well as our hands. How it feels to us is as important as how it works. A poorly designed kitchen may mean that a major meal will take 10 to 25 minutes more to make because of wasted motion, wasted energy and wasted time.”

Beall admits “designing a small kitchen can be just as costly per square foot as a large one, the average kitchen (about 350-375 square feet) running between $30,000 and $40,000.” He breaks these costs down to approximately $10,000-$15,000 in cabinetry, $6,000 in appliances and $10,000-$15,000 in construction costs.

“The first thing I ask clients to do is to give me a list of everything they want in a kitchen, even if they think some of their wishes are out of their price range,” Beall says. “It’s surprising how these things can be adapted and worked somehow into a plan.

“In Southern California we treat our kitchens like the classic great rooms of the 18th Century,” he adds. There are many functions we like to perform here.”

“We live in our kitchens and do most of our entertaining in the kitchen. And, everyone wants to be able to eat in the kitchen, even if they have a separate dining room (which is only used on more formal occasions). This is how a great room functioned. I’ve even been called on to make a great room out of a small bowling alley of a room and made it work.”

Note: More than two-thirds of Beall’s clients want country-style kitchens.

Bill Peterson, both an A.S.I.D. and I.S.I.D. affiliate, a certified kitchen designer (C.K.D.) as well as a contractor, has been in the kitchen business for 61 years, having gotten his start in his grandfather’s cabinet shop in Southern California. He has been affiliated with such prestigious kitchen cabinet manufacturers as St. Charles and most recently Wood-Mode. Peterson has been an instructor in kitchen and bath design for 10 years at UCLA. Although he recently cut back his Santa Monica-based design business to about five major jobs a year, he has created as many as 200 kitchens a year.

“A California kitchen means openness, casualness and size,” Peterson says. “We have the space to devote to a kitchen here. Because we literally live in our kitchens, family rooms and breakfast rooms are most often combined in kitchen spaces. And when these spaces open out to the outside, which so many of our kitchens do, the entertaining possibilities are more than doubled.”

Peterson feels that the most important aspect of space planning in kitchen design is “to reduce the number of steps a cook has to take and to plan storage around a plausible working pattern. A good working pattern does not necessarily put the cook at a sink under the window--that’s a real fallacy,” says Peterson. “If the sink should be in the island, then that’s just where I put it. As a matter of fact, I like to install two sinks anyway--a cleanup sink and a preparation sink.”

Another important point Peterson feels that people should consider is the use of the so-called commercial or restaurant-style ranges. Not only are they a possible hazard to small children because of the intense heat they emit, he claims, but the spaces around them have to be properly fire-proofed before they can be legally installed.

Here how interior designers Maxine Smith and Celia Cleary of Beverly Hills see the California kitchen:

“For years women wanted to be out of the kitchen. Now, it’s where everyone wants to be--the gathering place. It’s the family room of the ‘80s, a place that warrants comfort, warmth and personality,” says Smith.

“The kitchen should be the most personable room in the house as well as the most functional,” says Cleary. “Kitchens are rooms for the whole family and seem to say the most about the people who live there. The California kitchen is very much a part of the outdoors . . . we tend to bring the outdoors inside by using large windows, doors, skylights and by using lighter and airier materials. The California kitchen is warm and washed with sunshine.”

One especially attractive kitchen designed by Smith and Cleary is in the Los Angeles home of composer Michael Post and his wife Darla. Formerly two rooms that were outdated and just didn’t work for the family, the old kitchen was completely gutted. The new kitchen has a country feeling, although the cabinetry (which features glass and solid doors) is sleek and white. The pink-and-white wallpaper with blue hearts on a white border by Motif Designs gives the room a soft pastel quality. “Light and airy with a country feeling is the way I would describe it,” Smith says. At Darla Post’s request, the kitchen features a cooking island where family and guests can sit to eat and chat while she cooks. At one end of the kitchen is a breakfast nook beside French doors that open onto a patio and the pool beyond.

Van-Martin Rowe, whose innovative designs recently appeared in several national magazines, says “the kitchen is the room where people live in the ‘80s. The Southern California kitchen is larger, not because our homes are necessarily larger than homes around the rest of the country, but we just happen to devote more space to our kitchens. Everybody wants to be part of the cast, so to speak, so I allow a minimum of 42 inches around islands and between counters so that people aren’t constantly running into each other.”

Rowe, of Los Angeles, created a unique, efficient and personal kitchen for the Pacific Palisades home of Diane and David Schoeff . “This was a big change for the Schoeffs, who had lived in this house with its former, outdated kitchen for 15 years,” Rowe says. Rowe designed a 50x16-foot room that houses kitchen, dining and living/family room. The kitchen has an ocean view and opens onto an interior courtyard.

“The kitchen is all shades of white,” as Rowe describes it. “The 2-foot square counter tiles (from American Marazzi) is a grayish white; counter edging is pure white; cabinetry is bleached and pickled maple; all appliances, sink and faucet are white. The 4x8-foot island contains a self-venting cooktop on one side, a counter for eating and guest conversation on the other.

“I felt that in such an open space to block any view with an overhead range hood would have been a mistake,” Rowe adds. The designer, however, kept the work triangle (proximity of sink to stove to refrigerator) compact so that the cook wouldn’t have to run to work efficiently.

Lighting is a combination of incandescent fixtures--halogen lighting that washes the ceiling, wall sconces, uplighting in the beam that traverses the dining area--even the under-counter lighting is incandescent.

Angie Sheldon of Imagination! Design Concepts, Beverly Hills, feels that the continuing interest in food and its preparation has generated a greater awareness on the part of consumers. Menial cooks have become star chefs. At the same time, the obsession of many Californians with home entertaining has caused a transformation of the kitchen into a gathering place where cooking is the main attraction.

Therefore, there are no set rules for designing a “California kitchen,” she says. But the nouvelle cuisine influence and the use of more exotic foods and their special requirements have dictated expanded needs in kitchen layout as well as the necessity for particular appliances and built-in conveniences.

For the kitchen remodel Sheldon performed for this past spring’s 1987 Pasadena Showcase House of Design, she transformed a large, dark and outdated space into an attractive, highly functional haven for the gourmet. The old kitchen was gutted, leaving only bricks and beams which were lightened and brightened with paint and special lighting. Whitewashed oak cabinetry and light colored oak floors set the theme for a 1980s-style freshness.

The new Wood-Mode cabinets The new Wood-Mode cabinets are used along the long window wall and as the base of the large 4-foot by 8-foot island which contains a marble-top bake center, a Jenn-Air barbecue and a snack counter. A commercial-type stove by Viking is housed in the brick arch near the island. Other state-of-the-art appliances are prominently featured as are such conveniences as swing-out spice racks, knife drawers, sliding trays, a mobile serving cart, vegetable bins and a pot rack over the island. A breakfast room is adjacent, created out of an enclosed porch area.