White Oak Cottage Kitchen

The starting point of this design was one of sentiment.

The desire to keep it simple led interior designer Melanie Pounds and husband toward the purchase of a small 1920′s cottage.  Pounds designed its kitchen around their first joint purchase – an antique worktable.  The room is full of visually heavy pieces, yet they don’t weigh it down.  To my untrained eye, the trick is the use of only two colors (almost monochromatic, with basic brown and black) and each element is visually equal.  It’s hard to take my eyes off the warm wood of the worktable, but the dramatic soapstone range wall [detailed below] does the trick.  Pounds selected the heavily veined slab knowing it would become “art” above the matte black LaCanche Cluny range.  Counters are also soapstone, as well as the pair of Boston Williams farmhouse sinks – one on each side of the range.  Both were fitted with high arc Kraus faucets.  Plank walls continue around the custom hood with its white oak brackets.  The rough-hewn beams are also white oak, and the material is repeated again in the lower cabinets in a reeded finish.

(Source: House Beautiful)