A Recipe Success

A green builder explains how the rich colors and patterns of environmentally friendly material add to the lively charm of this Austin kitchen—without inflating the remodeling costs.

September/October 2003
By Bobby Zirkel  
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Mary Sims’s remodeled kitchen is energy efficient, comfortable, and inviting.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL BARDAGJY
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Mary Sims knew she had to do something. She had just bought an early 1950s duplex in the Austin, Texas, SoCo (South Congress) neighborhood, and the kitchen in her unit was a catastrophe. “It was so badly designed and depressing,” she laments. “I felt claustrophobic because it was so dark and enclosed.”

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The cabinets were stained dark brown, and layers were peeling off some of the plywood cabinet doors. A huge cabinet, built to cover up what had originally been an exterior doorway to the other unit of the duplex, was completely out of proportion with the rest of the room. Within a week, a friend brought over his Sawzall, and the two began taking things apart. They removed the offending cabinet, along with a counter, range, and the upper cabinets, all of which protruded into the room, giving the old kitchen a tight U shape. Then Mary called me to begin discussing the remodel.

Kitchen remodeling can be one of the most challenging home-improvement projects a homeowner tackles. The multitude of options for flooring, countertops, cabinets, and other components often seems overwhelming, and the question of what to keep and what to replace is not always easy. Yet, as Mary discovered, incorporating green building principles into a kitchen can help with making all those decisions—without adding to the cost.

Mary’s remodel was completed for less than $17,000, and the outcome is more than she could have hoped for. “I wanted the kitchen to have a playful aspect, to be a place where you’re not just washing dishes and cooking,” she says. “The kitchen should be a room where people want to hang out.”

Vintage Cooking

Mary’s kitchen scheme was planned around a yellow 1951 Chambers stove that she found on eBay. The stove includes a broiler, a grill, and a covered hold called a Thermowell for cooking soups. Chambers’ motto is “Cooks with the gas turned off,” because the heavy-duty cast iron construction retains heat long after the flame is off. There are no pilot lights, so the stove is truly energy efficient.

We encountered a design dilemma regarding how—or whether—to conceal the duct for the stove’s vent hood. Placing a cabinet above the hood would not be very useful because the duct would take up most of the interior space, and simply building a drywall soffit down from the ceiling to the vent hood just wouldn’t look right. Freestanding vent hoods can be prohibitively expensive, so as an economical alternative, we left the duct exposed, with the hood suspended from a painted box frame. We placed galvanized sheet metal on the wall behind it and on the ceiling above, adding another metallic component and giving the whole structure a more unified effect. The exposed duct contributes another visual element to the kitchen.

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