The modern mid-century dream kitchen isn’t the kitchen that Lucy Arnez or Donna Reed or Carol Brady had. It also isn’t the kitchen you might find in vintage kitchen ads. And it certainly isn’t the kitchen you’ll find in most builder grade ranches.
So what exactly is it then?
According to Google, it’s slab cabinets in warm wood tones, sleek metals, minimalist hardware and tile set in simple, geometric patterns.
According to home and garden media, it’s an open, busy social space.
And both of those descriptions hold up! But YOUR mid-century dream kitchen may differ because your kitchen, your rules.
You are actually the most important element in your mid-century dream kitchen. Your kitchen isn’t just a place to cook; it’s an extension of you! Whether you’re a mid-century purist or someone who loves blending eras, the key is to design a kitchen that works for your life and the way you want to live in your kitchen.
Your dream kitchen may be closed to hide messes or protect your creative process. It may be open to EVERY social area of the house so you never have to miss a laugh or feel alone. Maybe your “extroverted but messy” cooking personality means a bit of a hybrid.
Now there are some important elements to be sure to include as you work to infuse your personality into your kitchen. Those are just good design and they include:
- In-facing Work Spaces. Even in separated kitchens, you want an in-facing spot where multiple folks can work or visit and make eye contact across a shared surface. This could be a large island, a peninsula or even a mobile butcher block that changes location as needed.
- Storage. Kitchens are full of daily use items, tools and gadgets – even for folks who do less “cooking” and more “warming up”. A well designed kitchen has the storage options you need to feel prepared for the tasks at hand. This is likely a combination of open and closed storage. Depending on how you use your kitchen, it may include an appliance garage for your Kitchen Aid mixer or a coffee nook with everything necessary to start your day.
- Lighting. I cannot overemphasize the importance of lighting in your kitchen. Design for natural light with windows, skylights and solar tubes. Add good general light with a ceiling fixture or pendants for darker days and nighttime. Be sure to include task lighting for your work zones, plus ambient lighting to set the mood. Use efficient LEDS in warm tones and make sure everything is on a dimmer to give you the most flexibility.
Beyond these considerations, what makes up your dream kitchen is yours to decide.
Do you have an original time capsule kitchen in your house that you’re trying to preserve? The best thing you can do to keep some parts of it intact, then update the layout deal with the social and technological changes that we’ve experienced in the last 70 years.
Are you trying to put back a timeless style after a previous owner’s thoughtless update? Start from your style guide and put together a list of the materials, the finishes, the arrangements of space that speak to you from the mid-century era and then build them into a modern mid-century dream kitchen layout.
But the real bottom line is, feel free to listen to your own lifestyle as you change the layout. Ask yourself how you, the other members of your household and visitors like to live in your kitchen. Start there and build outward to create a perfect mid-century dream kitchen for yourself.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why you are the most important design element of your dream kitchen.
- The (very few) universals of good kitchen design.
- Quick kitchen fixes to try if your big remodel is still a ways off.
Listen Now On
Resources
- Be sure to sign up for my 2024 Kitchen Clinic! Grab a spot even if you can’t make it live, because we’ll send you the replay.
- And grab my Mid Mod Kitchen Essentials freebie to help you plan your perfect kitchen.
- Check out my blog post about mid-century style in the film Hidden Figures and my episode on the homes in Collier Heights.
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Learn how to get ready to remodel by watching my FREE Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”, ON DEMAND.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Are you planning a kitchen upgrade that’s going to make a time capsule out of your house, or maybe one that’s just timeless in a way that means you don’t need to plan for another remodel in 10 years time. I work with households all the time who want to do one or the other, or split the difference.
Relatively few of us actually want to go back in time authentically to the mid-century kitchens as they were, there are still some things that have changed of the dream of the mid-century kitchen back then to the way we dream of living in our kitchens today. And one of the most important ones is how specifically suited to your household to your family to your lifestyle, the layout of your kitchen is so if you’re looking for ideas to make adjustments to your kitchen, or to roll back a previously completely out of period remodel, let’s talk about what makes a modern mid-century kitchen, a dream kitchen.
Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1604.
I just have one thing to tell you this week before we get started on our main topic, and that is that I hope I’m going to see you at this weekend’s live mid-century kitchen clinic, I really want you to be there. This isn’t just a history lecture or a sales webinar, it is a live workshop where we’re going to go through some of the real time planning exercises you need to get through to plan a great update for your kitchen.
Whether you’re dreaming of a big remodel soon, or just looking for some ways you can tweak the space you have with small weekend projects that actually make a difference, you’re gonna get some great value out of this clinic. Plus, you’ll get the added bonus of being in a group of fellow mid-century kitchen lovers all in the same place at the same time.
That magical validation that comes from knowing you’re not alone in loving the things that you love about your mid-century home, which will stand you in good stead when you go out into the world and get advised to put white subway tile as a backsplash by your contractor because the last five people he she or they worked with on their project like that solution for their non mid-century house.
By the way, if you can’t show up live to get that wonderful feeling of togetherness, if you’re not free on Saturday at 11am Central, but you’re still thinking about kitchen updates do absolutely still sign up anyway, we’ll be recording the workshop and as soon as it’s over, we’ll upload it to the cloud so that you can enjoy it as a replay on your own time, almost as much as you would in person. The one thing you’ll miss out by not being live with me is getting to ask your questions live during the course of the workshop and in the q&a at the end.
But if that’s you, if you’re not gonna be able to be there live, just shoot an email or a DM to me in the meantime, to let me know that you’re coming. You won’t be watching live and you’ve got your question in advance. I’ll be sure to answer it at the end of the live clinic in the q&a. And you’ll see it in the recording at your own convenience.
One more incentive in case you needed it. I don’t know why you do. This is going to be so much fun, just such a great romp. Even if you don’t have big changes planned to your kitchen, you should be there. But I always give the folks who attend these design clinics, a limited time discount code to join ready to remodel at a more affordable price. So more on that in the clinic. But if you’ve been struggling to get traction on whatever your plans are this year, or even just to focus on what it is that you really want to need to change about your home. I designed this homeowner planning support program with you in mind.
And I would love to help you make your remodel happen and make sure that it’s exactly what you need and nothing more ready to remodel takes you through every step of the master plan process with bite sized lessons design resources, planning workbooks, and live monthly support for me. The design clinics like this mid-century kitchen clinic are first and foremost part of a benefit that I offer to my current ready to remodel students. And I just make them open to the public as well because they’re there to juicy to keep selfishly closed.
So tag along and get a sense of what the ready to remodel program is like or just show up for the live clinic to get a jumpstart on your kitchen plans. And then you can worry about the rest of the house later. You can sign up for the clinic at mid mod desk midwest.com/clinic Or you can just get all the information I’m about to share with you the show notes some of the visuals I’m going to talk about at the show notes page mid mod dash midwest.com/1604.
Last week we talked about the dream kitchen of the mid-century era, not the kitchen everybody had but the aspirational kitchen they saw on their TV shows and and magazine ads. Now today I’m going to talk to you about the aspirational the dream kitchen of today which to a certain extent is the kitchen I trie to design over and over again in infinite specificity for my mid-century master plan clients. But I want to begin with a comment that might feel like a little bit of a cop out because I don’t think there is a right answer. And I want to be sure that before we get into universal ideas of what might be beloved about the concept of a mid-century kitchen suitable for today and in the future, that you have the right to do whatever is right for you.
Kitchens are so personal. So everything I’m going to say to you, I want you to take it with a large grain of salt I want you to take it in and see if it resonates with you, and then move on it. Because I’m going to talk to you about how to create a timeless style in your kitchen. I’m going to talk to you about things I’ve seen my clients asked for, and that we’ve suggested in all of the kitchens, we’ve updated and upgraded to make them more functional, more social, more multi purpose. All of these things are good ideas for someone. But I also want you to just sit with the idea that you are the most important element to success in your kitchen upgrade.
The most important part of it is how well it suits the life you want to live in your home. And again, this is hugely important to my design ethos. The biggest contrast that I see between how I approach remodels for people and how the big box stores sell them or you know the thing I’m talking about this whole season, the HGTV approach to remodels that there is one right way that everyone should make their kitchen look like this magazine kitchen. I don’t think that’s true. And I see this all the time when I talk to my clients specifically.
I always begin by asking them about themselves, their household, their life, how they work in their spaces. When we’re talking about kitchens, I get a wide range of answer. And just off the top of my head, two of the most recent kitchen conversations I’ve had with clients came down on entirely opposite sides of this question. In one case, even with a very open floor plan layout for the kitchen and the living room in the existing original mid-century house. The most important quality of the kitchen for that homeowner was that she be able to see her whole family basically at all times when she’s in the kitchen, whether they were together hanging out or doing separate activities. Now in that case, that was one person her the main food producer in the household, but she wanted to be able to see everybody else wherever else they might be in the social space of the house.
So our priority number one for her was to make that kitchen as social as possible. A couple of the schemes, we had included a barstool Council, a social Island, a built in banquette dining area right next to it views out through to the living room all the way to the backyard and more, we opened up a broader window with a front so she could wave it neighbors going by and just worked to take this open plan kitchen and make it even more flowing. We created one solution where we removed most of the wall between the kitchen and the front door entry next to it because they’re not a formal entry kind of a household. So that way, you could walk right in the front door and immediately be at the kitchen island.
On the other hand, the other most recent client kitchen conversation I had was a couple that loves to cook together, they want space for two people to collaborate in the kitchen, which at the moment is the tiniest of galleys, between a brick exterior wall and a structural stairwell. So not a lot of opportunity to make it bigger. But their, particularly his, driving concern was he didn’t want anybody else to come into the kitchen with them while they were cooking.
When they have friends and family over it, those people should stay in the living room and relax and food will be prepared and brought to them. So the interest was not in making a kitchen that was really bigger, it was just a kitchen that was slightly tweaked. So there was room for two of them to move around each other, but not to invite anyone else into that space. This creates an entirely different set of design parameters. And we offered entirely different solutions.
Even if we had been starting from the same house, which of course we weren’t, we would have gone in two completely different directions with our layout suggestions to meet the needs of these two totally different households. So as we talk about the dream of the mid-century kitchen, back in time back in the actual mid-century era. From an aesthetic perspective, as well as a layout perspective, those elements are pretty consistent.
The elements of a historic mid-century dream kitchen are straightforward, not necessarily just a list of finishes. Because of course we see some turnover from steel cabinets in the early years and then later a wood finished in sort of warm ever shellac stain color and then sometimes painted a combination of both as the era goes on. And there are sometimes even in the mid 60s and beyond decorative fluidly elements or outlining of the door frames and cabinet frames applied to the cabinet doors. metal finishes throughout the era stay very consistent. It’s stainless the whole time for faucets, and mostly for knobs as well although you do see brass occasionally point of interest.
In the mid-century era stainless was the fancy finish. That was a finish applied over metal to hide it’s sort of original metal nature. And brass was just like metal being metal. Brass was the basic these days the way we produce and the way we work with metal. I think we think of the rose gold and the aged bronze and the matte black and the powder coated these are the processed metal finishes and chrome or stainless is considered sort of a metal metal. But that was actually opposite in the mid-century era.
Slight digression, I apologize. But as we go forward, what else is consistent? I guess what’s not consistent through the mid-century era is the changing panoply of fashion color for sinks. Faucets are for sinks, appliances, enamel, the best way to figure out what was in vogue in your favorite mid-century moment is just to Google for that year and the kitchen but the concept underlying those things, the different metal cabinets Do wood cabinets, the different colors of appliances, it’s pretty consistent.
And as I’ve said so many times before, in the mid-century era, the kitchen, even if it did had some social space, maybe an eating booth or light Peninsula or a casual dining slate situation, a pass through to an outer dining area or the living room. That core work area is a home office for the homemaker. This is what really changed for people who now live alone in a mid-century house. You still want your kitchen to be an inefficient workspace for one if you live alone in your mid-century house.
But even for me, I live alone in a home and I am the only person that cooks in my kitchen. But it still fails for me if it doesn’t have a social aspect. I can’t have a guest over and prep things in the kitchen without turning my back on them. And that frustrates me, which is why I use a small butcher block which I talked about last week as a level one solution to give me a place to turn outwards to make something to stir something to set something and make eye contact with a guest. I mean, it’s also just practical, more workspace even when I’m alone in the kitchen.
Although when I’m alone in the kitchen, I’m not really alone because my dog is there and I want to turn around and make eye contact with her again, the personal choices of one person in their household.
But all of these things or to say that even just for one person living alone, an antisocial kitchen layout feels like a problem in a mid-century kitchen. If there isn’t a visible place for socializing to take space, it’s going to read as antisocial to us it’s not going to read as an efficient workspace like it probably did to the original mid-century moderns who built it.
How does this contrast with the modern dream of a mid-century kitchen? Our contemporary idea of mid-century? Well, this is where we come back to the idea of talked about last week of what you put into Google mid-century kitchen, the image search results are going to be something that isn’t necessarily a time capsule and isn’t particularly accurate to that time capsule vintage kitchen. Some of the common design elements are still there, the wood stain the wood grain slab fronts rather than ornate cabinet finishes.
But in some ways, it’s almost easier to design to define what a modern mid-century dream kitchen today is by what it’s not. So it’s not a kitchen that looks very harshly contemporary. It’s not also a kitchen that looks vintage to before the mid-century era. So it’s a kitchen without crown molding, without complicated cabinet doors, any kind of combination constructed wood door, it is a kitchen with minimalist handles and hardware without marble or granite surfaces. It’s probably not gray. It’s not filled with canned lights because lighting is oriented to a few key workspaces. And it doesn’t have any of the signature design elements of other eras. No shaker cabinets, no farmhouse sink, no ornamental woodwork of any sort, no subway tile, no brushed nickel, anything.
That’s a lot of defining something that is by what it is not. So what is the sort of aesthetic language of a modern mid-century dream kitchen? Well, it’s simple cabinet boxes with slab fronts, possibly I would say falls within the category it could be a plywood, like a curve for apply IKEA style of cabinet. It’s very simple hardware and fixtures with basic curvature shapes, no ornate fluted style details, it’s got some wood in it somewhere, possibly the cabinet faces entirely possibly counter surface, maybe just some shelving. And that wood that’s in the kitchen is speaking to the wood stain color found elsewhere in the house. It’s a warmer rather than a cooler tone. And it’s probably lighter rather than darker. But it’s not blonde.
But what really makes a modern mid-century dream kitchen today is the shift in the layout. The materiality needs to speak a certain language in order to read as mid-century. But the dream aspect doesn’t necessarily come from the finishes it comes from the transformation in our layout. So this is where whether I’m working with someone who’s mid-century style quiz result is modern mid-century, or someone whose goal is to construct a perfect time capsule. The first questions I’m going to ask them when we speak is how will they live in their kitchen space. And like I said at the top, I do have clients who want a one person kitchen. Clients who love galleys. Clients who want a kitchen that’s going to keep the riffraff out of their workspace, or more politely the guests comfortable in the living room.
But in most cases, the single most important addition to the layout of a mid-century kitchen is some social workspaces. We need to create some spot where two individuals can face each other across the surface and hold a conversation while doing kitchen activities. So that every moment spent in the kitchen is not a choice between cooking related tasks or human interaction. It’s really nice to be able to do both without shouting over your shoulder.
As I talk about what makes a modern mid-century dream kitchen today, what makes an idealized kitchen which again has to be so personal, there are a few universal pieces of advice I draw from and I’m going to borrow actually from you The mid-century kitchen clinic I’ll be giving this weekend. I’ll be talking about these in greater detail at the clinic. But there’s a couple of sort of universal layout language pieces that I use. I don’t know if I would describe these as vocabulary or syntax. But I think about these in every kitchen layout I come to.
Pretty much any good kitchen has that work surfaces that face into the space rather than all work surfaces facing a wall or window. This just wasn’t a common feature of mid-century builder grade ranch house kitchens. So we nearly always need to adjust the layout to make that happen.
The other necessary the next necessary element is you’re going to need storage. And again, the common mid-century kitchen didn’t handle storage the way that we desire today. That classic builder grade ranch kitchen has base cabinets with doors, not drawers, and upper cabinets with doors of simple shelves. There’s usually just one run of shelves somewhere that might be more open or region. And today we aspire to so much more functional storage than that drawers galore, handy region style pantry that everything you need daily sort of at sort of torso height, so you don’t have to bend over and have to grab things you need.
The other thing that is universal to kitchen, sort of regardless of the preferences of the people that live in them. Well, yeah, no, I’m gonna stand on that I’ve never had anyone say I would like a particularly dark kitchen. This is maybe the most HGTV piece of advice I’m gonna give you but it’s actually in the form of the theory of the show that on HGTV channel, not the house that’s remodeled for the show. And that is lighting.
TV certainly concerned with lighting. A truly dreamy kitchen needs great lighting, and for anyone who’s ever taken a picture of their plate for Instagram. Not much but I am guilty of this. You know the difference between great lighting and edible appealing beautiful objects on a plate and something that actually looks kind of gross and inedible, even though it tasted good. The same is true of the experience of seeing the food you prepare in your kitchen and eat the surfaces you so lovingly choose during the remodel and then paint have install at top dollar and clean every day and the faces of the loved ones in that space.
But good lighting doesn’t just mean a lot of lighting or bright lighting it means lighting in the right spaces for the right times. A quick rule of thumb is bringing as much daylight as you can expand the windows at a skylight maybe light tubes. Then because the light isn’t always bright outside plan for good general lighting. But please don’t succumb to your electricians desire to fill your kitchen space with canned lights. I would argue actually that you don’t need any canned lights at all in a kitchen update in a mid-century kitchen. You do want a ceiling mounted lighter to possibly aided by pendants or downlights over your inward facing workspace, whether it’s an island or a peninsula.
Why I don’t love candlelight is another story but generally they don’t do the most important thing you need in a kitchen which is to light work surfaces closely. And that’s the third kind of letting you need task lighting. That means bright warm colored LED lights at the sink and the cooktop, it might mean under cabinet lights or under shelf lights at any wall facing work surface. It certainly means that where you work any place you’re doing tasks wiping counters chopping, prepping, stirring washing should be able to be warmly and brightly lit enough to make your task look appealing to you.
And then a fourth kind of lighting, mood lighting, ambient lighting light for when you want to make a final sweep of the kitchen before bed when you want to have a conversation with a glass of wine as you clean up. When you want to pour a calm cup of coffee on a winter morning. This might just be a dimmable version of your previously mentioned task lighting. But it’s not for doing tasks. It’s about creating a soothing pleasant space overall, mostly when the kitchen is not in use.
So those lighting elements are essential. And then the fourth element of a modern dream mid-century kitchen update is a hangout space in the kitchen. Not just a table, not just an eating space, although that can be nice. Not everybody wants to eat in their kitchen. Some people do that’s one thing but a place to hang out might be a bench might be a reading chair, might be a built in bench with a table might be a comfortable table with really comfortable chairs. But it’s a place to take a cozy rest. It’s a place to do homework. It’s a place to work from home.
If you’re ever going to do that. It could serve the purpose of also being a pull up a seat at an island place. It could be benches. It could be barstools at an island, but it needs to be truly comfortable. And truly the kind of place that you could spend an hour hanging out working, resting, relaxing, chatting with the cook taking a break as the cook while things come in and out of the oven or simmer on the stove. These are to my mind the things that every dreamy, truly idealized kitchen update contains today.
So I thought I would wrap up this part of the episode by shouting out a couple of modern mid-century television kitchens. And this is where where it’s so interesting because we lose the ability to see anachronism in our own time, you can only really see it when the thing that’s referring to older art also becomes older, like you look at an adaptation of a historic book. And you can sort of see that it doesn’t seem quite period that everyone’s hair is a little too clean. It’s all a little bit odd. Like maybe the clothing styles just don’t quite seem like they do in the paintings. But it’s only like 10 years later that you say, oh my god, everybody in that movie had bangs. No one in that actual historical time period had bangs. So it’s, it’s like that with kitchens where when you see a show that set in the mid-century era made now it can sometimes be really hard to identify what are the anachronistic moments.
One of the least offenders of this recently was in the very first episode of the Apple TV show lessons and chemistry. Brie Larson is a frustrated scientist who takes out her inability to control the conditions in the lab where she works as an assistant by performing dozens of replicates of cooking experiments to create the perfect lasagna in her kitchen. And one of the things that struck me about that, in that very first episode of the show was that her kitchen was an older mid-century home probably might have been older than the 40s. It had kind of a 1940s kitchen. And it was not modernized to show an island layout. She did have a little butcher block freestanding furniture unit, and so she could turn and set down the lasagna.
But she works alone in that kitchen. And even for the sake of cinematography. They didn’t open it up our views of her through it are shot through narrow doorways from the pantry, along the line of the sink, worksurface and wall. And she really is working in a one person, home office for the homemaker kitchen, and it suits her perfectly in the show to have that accurate setup.
But the counter example that often pops into my mind when I think of almost perfect mid-century sets is the movie Hidden Figures, which I’ve talked about on the podcast before. This follows the personal lives and work lives of several black women who worked at NASA and were essential elements of the team that launched people to the moon. their personal lives are also important. So we follow them home during the narrative of the story. And we see several of them in their own kitchens. And I was beyond tickled when I learned that the set for this movie was in Atlanta, or the movie was shot in Atlanta, and the homes that they go to are in a residential neighborhood that is a real place a historically black neighborhood Collier heights in the area of Atlanta, and I also did a podcast episode about that neighborhood. So go check that out.
When was the Collier heights episode? I think that was in season two. Nope, it was not. That was in season three, I think season. So episode maybe 309 and 310. Yeah, white flight in Collier heights and housing discrimination in the mid-century. This is a fun thing to get into. So if you’re curious at all about that, go check it out. Also just Google Hidden Figures kitchen, and you’ll pop up with some of the images. I’ll put them in the show notes as well.
But here’s the point. So they shot the interiors and exteriors of these houses in these gorgeous original black designed black owned homes in Collier heights in Atlanta. That’s amazing. But these houses had been lived in and occupied by happy, successful people since the mid-century era, and they had been slightly updated, particularly the kitchen of the main character has some really, really specific changes. At first glance, it looks like a great mid-century kitchen. It’s got slab frame cabinets, it’s got sort of atomic details around it.
But it’s also tucked into a corner of the house but open to both the dining room next to it and the living room on the other side and has a literal waterfall countertop edge. So as there’s a great scene where two of the characters are cooking, and one of them is dancing around outside the kitchen space, they’re all having a conversation together. That’s the definition of what you can’t do in a historically accurate mid-century kitchen.
So you could say it’s a perfect example of the modern mid-century dream kitchen, but it is also a modern anachronism. In the end, let’s think about what’s changed and what stayed the same. There’s still so much to love about the mid-century, mid-century dream kitchen.
And if you have an original time capsule kitchen in your house that you’re trying to preserve, the best thing you can do to keep some parts of it intact while you upgrade update the layout deal with the social change the household change the technical, logical changes that we’ve experienced in the last 70 years.
And it’s to list out the pieces you liked the most. Do you like some of the materials perhaps they can be preserved or recreated? Do you like this sort of color palette, the warm tone wood stain the handles, I mean, you could salvage and repurpose the exact handles from your kitchen into a new layout for example, or you can at sea or state sale source more of them if you’re going to expand the storage space in your kitchen.
If you’re trying to put back a sense of timelessness after a previous owner’s thoughtless update, you can start from your style guide and put together a list of the materials, the finishes the arrangements of space detail that speak to you from the mid-century era, and then build them into a modern mid-century dream kitchen layout.
But the bottom line is, I want you to feel free to listen to your own lifestyle as you change the layout. So the most important questions you can ask yourself are how to you and the other members of your household and the people who come there regularly like to live in your kitchen, start there and build outward to create a perfect mid-century dream kitchen for yourself.
Before we wrap up for the week, here are your weekly words of encouragement. Remember that giving yourself the gift of a master plan is making your life easier. In particular, that third D distill is all about simplifying your life. It’s not a homework assignment you need to do, it’s a gift you give yourself to cut down your options, your indecision from everything on the internet exist as a possibility to here are a few choices that you can actually look at and weigh the pros and cons of and feel an organic preference for make your life easier in general, save time and stress save going in circles with contractors about what or is what is not your style.
And as a side benefit, create a cohesive looking design early remodel. What I want you to know is that you can do this, setting a style guide for your house is not a matter of having taste, or being trained in mid-century design, it’s simply a matter of ruling things out until you have a set of simple decisions ready to make before you so give yourself the gift of taking the time to set yourself a style guide. And if you want more help with this, you can go to mid mod dash midwest.com/styleguide to get an easy workbook to set you on the right path for this project. Good luck, my friend, you’ve got this.
Here’s what you could do right now this weekend to make your kitchen feel a little bigger without a remodel at all. And that is to take off some or all of the upper cabinet doors. Particularly if you live in a kitchen that’s been remodeled out of the mid-century era. And the cabinet doors you’re looking at are a weird pink color and overly ornate detail shaker, what have you not a particularly mid-century choice, why not make them disappear, you can make this happen with a screwdriver and setting them aside, you could always put them back up later if you change your mind.
This is by the way, also the kind of change you could make in a rental unit that’s perfectly reversible. But the other benefit you’re gonna get is not just not seeing cabinet doors that don’t match your period. It’s also that the kitchen will feel bigger, because without changing the floor area at all, you’ve given yourself a little more visual room seeing all the way to the back of the cabinet to the wall behind.
And so step two of this update is take the cabinet doors off and if you’re inclined, you can paint the inside of the cabinets or just the back wall, the same color as the wall that’s around them to enhance that effect of looking from wall to wall in the kitchen instead of from upper cabinet face to upper cabinet face. This can make your kitchen feel several square feet larger, which will feel like a significant difference. And depending on your preferences for seeing your clutter or not, it might help you feel a little more connected to the things that are happening currently behind closed doors in your kitchen. So what are you going to take on this week? I’m really curious to find out and I’d love it if you drop me a DM about the small changes you have made or are thinking about making to your mid-century kitchen.
So for the transcript of this episode, a link to the resources I mentioned in the show notes page go to mid mod dash west.com/ 1604 Go sign up for this weekend’s clinic at mid mod dash midwest.com/clinic. Or, if you’re already signed up, maybe take a few minutes to prepare for the questions. I will be asking you on Saturday by mulling over what makes a dream kitchen experience in your household. Once you know that I’ll have some practical tips on Saturday to adjust your space and make that experience happen.
Next week on the podcast as a special pre Valentine’s Day episode, I’ll be walking you through my method for minimizing partner disagreement around remodeling choices. So if you live with someone you love and you’re planning any home improvements, don’t miss that one. Okay, see you Saturday.