15min readI tell my clients that there isn’t one “right” answer. I tell my students that there isn’t one “right answer. But honestly? I have opinions.
Do you ever find yourself wishing that someone would just tell you the right choice for every finish in your remodel? Between the tile, the fixtures, and the endless cabinet options, the sheer volume of decisions is EXHAUSTING.
Now you probably know me as the person who ALWAYS has options for you to consider. I like to offer alternatives, pros and cons, and let people tell ME what possibilites are landing best for them.
Options for the optimal layout. Options for tile color. Options for replacing or keeping your original windows. There’s a silver lining for every cloud and an advantage for every starting situation as I approach a remodel.
I tell my clients and students that there isn’t one “right” answer all.the.time.
Straight talk, tho?
I do have opinions. Lots of them.
My friends and family know me as someone who will judge a poorly designed building harshly AND at length.
Let’s focus on the positive here, though.
Just for today, I’m putting aside the “it depends” caveats and giving you my unvarnished hot takes on THE CORRECT choices for a mid-century kitchen update.
23min readWhat’s a mid mod remodeler with a small kitchen to do? If you’re living in a home built in the early part of the era—or even a more “generous” late-60s ranch—you’ve likely realized that mid-century kitchens were designed for a different way of living.
Does the kitchen in your mid-century house feel a little snug? Maybe it’s a bit tight when two adults try to hold a conversation, or you find yourself constantly hunting for more than six inches of clear work surface.
If you’re living in a home built in the early part of the era—or even a more “generous” late-60s ranch—you’ve likely realized that mid-century kitchens were designed for a different way of living.
But you don’t always have to knock down walls or build a massive addition to find relief. And sometimes you just can’t! You may have stairs or another structural feature hemming in your kitchen.
So what’s a mid mod remodeler with a small kitchen to do?
I actually LOVE this question. And I’ve answered it literally hundreds of times..in a bunch of different ways! I create three kitchen options for almost every master plan and often explore double that number of possible configurations through the design process.
Each of these solutions is tailored to both the client and the house. But there are a few clear tricks of the “designing for a mid-century house” trade that I employ over and over again. Today I’m going to share those with you.
Think in zones, not just triangles
I talked about the kitchen work triangle (the path between your fridge, sink, and stove) earlier this season. While it might work well in a small one cook kitchen, it’s not great for busy social spaces. I recommend switching your mindset to think about work zones instead. I find I keep three zones in mind:
The Prep Zone: Keep your knives, cutting boards, and trash near your primary work surface.
The Clean-up Zone: Group the dishwasher, sink, and dish storage together.
The Social Zone: Even in a tiny kitchen, designate one “out of the way” spot where a guest can lean or sit with a drink without being underfoot.
By organizing your tools around activities rather than just appliances, you reduce the amount of shuffling you have to do in a tight space.
Scale down appliances
When you have a small kitchen, every square inch has to work twice as hard. In the US, we often think “bigger is better” for appliances. But a massive 36-inch professional range or a giant French-door refrigerator can swallow a small kitchen whole. Two quick space wins:
Consider counter-depth: Switching to a counter-depth refrigerator can reclaim nearly six inches of floor space, which makes a massive difference in a narrow galley kitchen. Or consider just a smaller daily refrigerator…with or without the Midwest classic “garage fridge” for overflow.
Right-sized your dishwasher: If you’re a household of one or two, consider an 18-inch dishwasher. It cleans just as well but gives you an extra 6 inches of precious cabinet storage.
Go low…and high
If you have lower cabinets with doors, you’re likely losing the back 50% of that space to “the abyss.”
Drawers over doors: Replace lower cabinets with deep drawers. Drawers allow you to see everything from above and utilize the full depth of the cabinet. Even for heavy pots and pans, a high-quality drawer slide is a game-changer for efficiency.
Use every inch: Claim three to four feet for work surface, then go full height. Filling vertical space with storage can be a big win in a small space.
Focus on alignment
If you’ve got just four feet between one run of cabinets and the other, you want to think about what’s happening opposite. You need to consider whats going on on both side elevations. Make sure that you have misaligned common standing room spaces.
Someone should be able to stand at the sink and NOT be immediately back to back or buty to butt with someone who is standing at the cooktop if it’s on the opposite wall. Shifting over by even two feet, but ideally a full three foot appliance or fixture width, really allows more people to multitask in the kitchen. And even allows one cook to rotate, take one step and get to where they need to go without disturbing a second cook.
Create visual breathing room
Consider trading some upper cabinets for open shelving or even just a window. Losing a little storage up top might feel scary, but if you’ve optimized your lower drawers correctly, the trade-off in “visual lightness” will make the room feel twice as large.
And don’t forget! This weekend you have the chance to see even more small kitchen solutions at my Live Mid-Century Kitchen Design Clinic. I’ll be doing deep dives into layouts just like these and answering all your kitchen questions. Grab your ticket at midmod-midwest.com/clinic and let’s get your kitchen project moving!
Does the kitchen in your mid-century house feel a little snug, a little tight, not enough storage, not enough work surfaces, and where exactly are two adults supposed to stand to hold a conversation without being totally in each other’s way? Today I’m talking about small space solutions for mid-century kitchens, because this is a very common problem. Mid-century houses, particularly those built in the early part of the era, have kitchens that are dramatically small by modern standards.
00:27
And even more generous footprints of mid-century houses built later in the late 50s and 60s, are often tight in the kitchen area. You can solve a small kitchen by making it bigger, pushing out into another part of the house, or adding on entirely. But if that feels out of scale for your life or for your budget, you need some small kitchen secrets. So that’s what we’ve got today.
00:48
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. And I’m your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2404.
01:00
Before I carry on with giving you my best advice for your small mid-century kitchen, let me tell you where you can get even more advice for your mid-century kitchen, which is to show up for this weekend’s live mid-century kitchen design clinic. I really want you to be there. This isn’t a history lecture or a sales webinar. It is a live design workshop where we’re going to go through real time planning exercises for your kitchen.
01:25
Whether you’re dreaming of a big remodel right now, big in a small kitchen, perhaps, or just looking for some ways you can tweak the space you have with weekend DIY projects, you will get something you can act on out of this clinic. Plus you’ll be in a Zoom Room with a group of fellow mid-century kitchen lovers all at the same time getting that validation that comes with knowing you’re not alone in loving the things you like about your mid-century house. Loving the things you love about your mid-century house.
01:52
By the way, if you can’t show up live, if you’re not free this coming Saturday the 16th, at 11am Central time, but you are thinking about kitchen updates, absolutely sign up anyway. We will be recording the workshop, and you can enjoy it almost as much if you watch it on your own time as a replay that you can in person. The one thing you would miss out on if you were to get the replay after the fact not being live is your chance to ask me questions about your specific kitchen. So if that’s you, if you can’t show up live, but you’ve got kitchen questions on your mind, sign up and then email or DM me to know that you did, and share your questions in advance so that I can address them at the end of the live clinic.
02:30
One more incentive, in case you needed it if you’ve been on the fence about the ready to remodel DIY homeowner program, which is a perfect fit for anyone who’s thinking about a mid-century kitchen update. I always give the folks who attend these design clinics limited time access to join ready to remodel at a discount, so I’ll talk about that more at the live event. But if you’ve been struggling to get your plans in motion or even to focus what it is you really want to need to change about your home, about your kitchen, I designed ready to remodel as a homeowner planning support program with you in mind, and I would love to help you make your remodel happen.
03:06
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 at my office hours call and these design clinics that pop up intermittently around every year, like the mid-century clinic are first and foremost for my current ready to remodel students. And then I invite the general public to join them as well, so tag along and get a sense of what that program is as well.
03:29
Or just sign up, show up live on Saturday and jumpstart your kitchen plans. Ask me your small space or big space mid-century kitchen questions at the end. Okay, well, let’s talk about the problem of small spaces in mid-century kitchens. I want to frame it first, because I am no stranger to working on small mid-century kitchens. I have designed, at this point, hundreds of remodel update options. Well, hundreds and hundreds, if we’re thinking about the fact that I like to design three different layouts for every master plan that comes across my desk, and I spend a lot of time developing strategies and techniques to fit good living into relatively small square footage. Because mid-century, houses are small.
04:13
I’m going to be talking in particular today with one recent project in mind that I think was the smallest, the snuggest I’ve ever worked on. But the solutions that work for them work for bigger kitchens and can also work for your life. As I think about that house, it is a galley kitchen tucked in between exterior walls and a major structural element, in this case, a stairwell. I’ve also…that that happens so commonly. It’s a very usual mid-century structural move to connect a house to its basement if it has a basement with a stair that either runs down the central spine of the house or separates the kitchen from the adjacent bedroom.
04:55
And that limits dramatically what we can do to expand the kitchen footprint without. Going to a big move, like an addition or move the stairs. When I’m thinking about a snug kitchen space, I do sometimes show my client an option where we do make a major blow it out structural change. Where we add on to the footprint of the house or do something like relocate the stair, remove a masonry fireplace because they’re not going to use it, it’s not serving them, or maybe it’s just not more valuable to them than good flow and good space in the kitchen.
05:28
But when the space is really snug, we just have to make the most of what’s going on. There are a couple of different things to consider in terms of priorities for a snug mid-century kitchen you want to think about first storage in an ideal capacity. By the way, if you want to think about layout solutions and design updates for mid-century kitchens, make sure you’ve grabbed my free guide to mid-century kitchen design solutions. You can get it from mid mod midwest.com/kitchen and in it, I talk about the good lighting features, the good workspace features, the good storage features, the good social space features and the good material features of a mid-century kitchen.
06:10
I’ve got storage right up in there. It is a major quality of mid-century space, but it is the thing I’m probably most likely to squish in a really, really small kitchen. What I want to prioritize in a truly small kitchen is counter space that does not have anything over it. I want to have at least some run of counter, ideally three, maybe four feet long, that has nothing hanging over it, no upper cabinets, maybe it actually has a view out into another part of the house through interior window, opening a pass through, maybe it looks out at a window, either a window that exists in the house already, or we’re cutting in a new window. I want to have that space, even if it means a sacrifice of existing storage.
06:56
Sometimes it means that we’re just sacrificing what had been a base cabinet with upper wall hung cabinets above it, making that counter surface less usable. And we’re bundling up. We’re creating we’re sacrificing two or four feet of counter space somewhere else for a full floor to ceiling pantry storage unit. That can be really effective. This can also be a time where, if there are pantry storage or major appliance storage needs in the kitchen that we don’t have space for inside the footprint of the kitchen. We’re going to look for a nearby a helper room that can have space borrowed from it.
07:34
This might mean we are taking over a little bit of front hall closet or storage space extending out from the kitchen. If we can remove a wall that separated the kitchen from one space, we can extend a line of counter out and get more drawer space, or have it turn into a bench with storage underneath it that lets us have kitchen storage space that’s not in the kitchen, but isn’t like hiking up and down the basement stairs from the kitchen.
08:03
For a truly small kitchen, you’re going to be a little conservative about what kinds of things you store in it. You might choose to, for example, have a really small refrigerator that either you treat yourself like a European and do more regular shopping for, or you’ve got a small daily use refrigerator that you’ve got. And then a classic Midwestern tradition is to downgrade your old fridge into the basement or possibly the garage and keep it around so you could have a backup fridge where you keep bulk goods, more frozen things. You could also think about having a step outside the kitchen space, deep chest freezer that has a lot more things capable to be stored in it.
08:41
These are, again, solutions that were used during the mid-century era. The idea of a garage refrigerator or a deep freeze, chest freezer somewhere outside of the kitchen footprint would not have been surprising ideas to our mid-century forbears. So trying to jam the world’s largest refrigerator into a kitchen with original mid-century cabinets not sized for that is something that just about everybody tries to do when they move into a house.
09:05
But it’s possible to think about the fact that maybe you don’t need such a big refrigerator. You could get away with a smaller one in that space and have a separate refrigeration unit somewhere else in the house. Now it may be that you struggle to even find any modern appliance that works, but particularly I’ve had, for example, large families with a lot of kids say, well, we just need the largest possible refrigerator capacity. And in certain cases, now always design of a scheme or two that have a big fridge option.
09:34
But we can sometimes think about, what if we used a smaller fridge in the space to prioritize more counter or more pantry storage or access to a wall, viewing through into the house, or viewing out of that side of the house, it would work better. These are the sort of tradeoffs of working with limited square footage in a small kitchen.
09:57
Not to digress too far from the topic. But I’ve been a really big fan of the HBO show, heated rivalry, and particularly with the magic of high production value they’ve accomplished with a really small budget, using, I don’t know the magic of being Canadian, but also, clearly the artistry and skill of the producer and director, Jacob Tierney. And I am such a nerd about deep diving into everything. I like I’ve watched several interviews with him, and I watched him talk about the value of working on small budget productions in his past, and a lesson he learned from his film director father on one of their first collaborations. That was a very small budget film they did together, where his dad framed to him, the fact that when you don’t have money for everything, part of your directorial choice is to choose where you will spend the money that you have. And that is the art at the end of the day of a producer and director.
10:51
This is a thing we have to consider in mid-century houses as well. It might be actually also the dollar value of our remodeling choices, but we can think about the value of square footage as also being at a premium in a small space. When we’re thinking about how best to use small space solutions prioritizing a certain amount somewhere in the kitchen of at least a four foot run of under interrupted counter work surface, in an ideal world that looks at a distance.
11:21
Gathering more of our storage into full height pantry storage, rather than treating upper cabinets as our solution. And unless you are in love with and have access to original in great shape mid-century cabinets when space is really snug, this is a place where we kind of want access to the interior storage solutions of cabinets that have base cabinets with drawers, rather than the classic mid-century cabinet door that you sort of have to get down squat on your haunches, look down and pull things out from fixed shelves to get into.
11:55
If you were truly handy, however, you could take the original mid-century cabinet boxes, remove their interior shelves and retrofit them with pull out drawers at the very least, if not pull out drawers behind cabinet doors, if not actually, I don’t know, rerouting new attachments for your existing doors. There are some things you could take on there if you really wanted to get vintage with it.
12:16
But if we’re dealing with a house that’s been remodeled in the past in a small footprint. I’m definitely going to advocate for the best quality, modern storage drawer base units, because you’re going to be able to jam a lot more things in and get access to things tucked in the back better with that.
12:32
If we’re locked into a galley style kitchen, or even just a kitchen that’s small, that doesn’t have a lot of space between one face of cabinets and another, a snug mid-century galley kitchen might have just four feet of sort of aisle space down the center five would be much more friendly.
12:51
But if you’ve got just four feet between one run of cabinets and the others, you want to think about what’s happening opposite. You can’t look at this kitchen only in terms of one side elevation, just the flat view, without thinking about the other. So trying to make sure that you have misaligned common standing room spaces, so that someone can stand at the sink and they won’t be immediately back to back or but to butt with someone who is standing at the cooktop if it’s on the opposite wall.
13:14
Shifting that over by even two feet, but ideally a full three foot sort of appliance or fixture width really allows more people to multitask in the kitchen, and even allows one cook to rotate, take one step and get to where they need to go better, particularly the place you want to try to make more clearance than just four feet is in front of a refrigerator, and this depends a little bit on the style of refrigerator.
13:41
We’re already talking about smaller, perhaps vintage units. If you have a French door refrigerator with two narrower doors that open out, there’s less of the through passage that is taken up by the door opening than particularly a three foot or a more than three foot wide refrigerator that has just one single side hinge door. When you open that up, you can completely cut off the entire lane of traffic in a galley kitchen. So choosing the design of your refrigerator probably French doors is better than single door, and choosing a smaller width, because those doors will then swing open and take less space.
14:16
And prioritizing trying to set the fridge in a place where it’s not opposite another close by wall of base cabinets or misaligning it from other key features like a range or a sink. This is a place where the kitchen work triangle actually comes into play as a counterfactual. No, that’s not really true, but it’s a place where thinking about those three major fixture appliances, the sink, the range and the refrigerator are important. What you want most of all is for them to be in a sort of an oblong triangle, so that none of them are back to back with the others.
14:51
As we’re regarding the kitchen in plan, the location in floor space of where various things are, if at all possible. It’s better to have straight runs of cabinets that die into a wall, rather than cabinets that turn and form an L for two reasons. One, that l corner is very hard to work into. Anyone who needs to get access to any part of that space within sort of two or even three feet of the corner is blocking everybody else’s access to it. They are more limiting for any appliance that needs to flip forward, for an under counter, oven door, for a dishwasher door, it can cut off more space if it’s tucked into an L and also, it’s harder to get access to that back of the corner space.
15:38
Now lazy Susan’s exist, and if you’ve got an exterior of house corner with a corner of base cabinets meeting in it, you’re just going to have to get clever with those lazy susan or pull out rotating drawer aftermarket fixes. But again, I don’t mind interior corners in in a broader cabinet layout if you’ve got a U shaped kitchen, that’s sometimes just the way that it works, but I don’t encourage them in a small kitchen. I would actually rather sacrifice an extra two feet of cabinet turning the corner than have an L shape where I don’t need it. They also often end up constricting doorways as you come in and out of a small kitchen space.
16:23
One…thought I was done talking about kitchens in plan, but no, I have one more thing. If you have a kitchen that serves not just as a cooking space but also is a collection of doors portals to other parts of the house, which, again, is super common in a mid-century house. My own mid-century kitchen, which is not tiny, has a door to what had once been the outside and now goes to the mudroom, a door that goes through a door with no doorway, a door opening that goes through the dining room. It has the door access to the basement stairs, and it has a door that leads to the third the nursery bedroom in my house.
17:02
I have, much to my own surprise, decided to keep all of those door portals. I really thought I was going to close off the access to the nursery bedroom because it seemed silly and I really wanted that extra square footage. I thought I could remove my refrigerator from its current location over to that spot. This is getting me out of the point anyway, when I moved into this house for at least two years, every part of me knew that I was going to be closing off that door. I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
17:27
But then I made a mistake. I started using the nursery bedroom as my home office, and now that’s my snack door, and I can never get rid of it. It’s super important to me.
17:39
So this, I suppose, brings me back to one of my most prime fundamental directives, which is, what matters to your life is more important than what is the most practical layout solution and a master plan approach to making the most of a small space. Means you can disregard the advice I’m about to give you if it doesn’t work for your life, but if you have more than one, more than two, more than three doors opening into a very small kitchen.
18:06
Think about if any of them can be closed off or turned into a pass through with counter in front of them, or in any other way, combined or relocated. Could you shift access to outside into it from an adjacent room? Could you reorient moving the stairs again gets us down to small space solutions and into big structural changes? But what could you consider stand and brainstorm around each one of those doors? Are they all necessary? The sort of British World War Two advertising poster question, is this journey really necessary?
18:42
And think about whether that might be a win of three extra linear feet of counter space in your very small kitchen that I think is going to take us to the end of the floor plan solutions. And then as we flip and start to look at the space in 3d we come back to one of the earlier points I talked about, which is, how much are you using the entire verticality of your wall?
19:05
I’m not a big fan of the mid-century classic, a base cabinet with upper cabinets shallow over it, so you’ve got your sort of appliance storage below, and your dish storage above, and the work surface sort of exists, but it’s also overshadowed by that upper cabinet, and you can’t lean in and really work there. Upper cabinets are fine in some places, but I always want to take them down in a few places and combine them into full floor to ceiling pantries. But that brings me back to the full floor to ceiling. Are you using it properly another fashion of mid-century kitchens that, honestly, I find a little baffling, was to soffit down the top foot, or 15 inches of the wall space in a kitchen and just block that off.
19:53
Sometimes there is air handling happening there. Sometimes it’s concealing duct work. Sometimes it’s in an electrical chase. But a lot of times it’s merely decorative. And if you are really graveled for storage, what you want in your kitchen is a step stool, no matter your stature, that allow you to get up into upper storage that goes all the way to the ceiling in a pitch. It’s better than moving those things to the basement and giving up the top foot, or 15 inches of your cabinet height to closed in soffit.
20:24
In some cases, again, if we’re trying to preserve a very classic vintage mid-century look, and we are not super snug on storage space, I will keep the upper soffit, but in most cases, I would rather use that for storage space, whether it feels super easily accessible or not. And again, in some part of the kitchen, you’ll get better effective use out of your space from a three or a four foot run of built in pantry storage that has drawers, that has interior organization that works better than your sort of classic closet pantry that you see in a builder grade mid-century kitchen.
20:58
Let’s sum it all up. What are the sort of secrets of making this most of a small space? You want to just really get inventive with your built ins, unless you are the proud owner of an entirely original mid-century kitchen, which is the golden handcuffs I find myself in. You need to replace 90s or early 2000s built ins with something else in order to really maximize a super small space for other people who are working more limited on budget than square footage. You can re face, re-door, refinish, even the most uncharming out of period 80s and 90s builder grade cabinets.
21:38
But if you are, if your most tight pinch point in your kitchen challenge is square footage even more than budget, you are going to want to make the most of your built ins. So to that end, I’m going to offer you two counter intuitive options for making the most of a small kitchen. You can make a small kitchen feel bigger by using wall mounted cabinets rather than our traditional Marin cabinets sit on the floor, European cabinets, the IKEA kitchen line, for example, is wall mounted. And it can float, hang over a floor space with no kick plate.
22:14
Even just being able to see a little bit of floor disappearing underneath just a three, four or five, six inch gap down there can make a small space feel a little bigger. This is also a solution I definitely recommend in small, snug bathrooms; a wall mounted vanity is key. It’s a space where you can add under cabinet lights to bring a little bit of brightness out of space, out of the sort of working area. And it can really be an effective way to make a kitchen feel bigger.
22:43
On the other hand, the opposite solution to that is not just to have a kick plate under floor mounted cabinets, but to activate that kick plate space for just a little bit more storage. I have seen people put pans bonus overflow spice drawers, keep their trash bags and saran wrap and wax paper rolls all in those sort of concealed in the baseboard storage units when you’re really scraping for every square inch you might want that.
23:10
Similarly, you can recess storage in between the studs of interior wall framing. You can take advantage of small space solutions like counter depth refrigerators, yes, a little bit more expensive, yes, a little less interior storage, but they will make a small kitchen feel bigger. And you should certainly be creative with every vertical inch and foot of your built ins go all the way to the ceiling, maybe, or maybe not, all the way to the floor.
23:35
And think about how the interior storage solutions of your built ins are really cleverly oriented, so that when you open them up, you’re not just seeing two foot deep of opaque can storage, but you maybe have the ability to sort of open out an inner drawer with something mounted on the doors well sprung, and then have a shallow interior space with interior lighting that you can easily see, manipulate and reach into don’t be afraid to move or to remove a problematic doorway. There is a power in reducing congestion.
24:11
Mid-century, kitchens often function as sort of mudroom, entry space, homework space. They multitask, sometimes too much, and while we always want to create more space for social areas inside of a kitchen. We don’t necessarily need the kitchen to be the major traffic zone of entering the house. This may be also tips towards the idea of micro additions, rather than feeling like your kitchen is too small, so you need to put a kitchen sized addition onto the outside of the house and put all of that expensive Plumbing and Heating and built in work out there.
24:44
You might think about just taking a few of the multitasking uses out of the kitchen. If the kitchen is also serving as your mudroom of vestibule addition, even a three season unheated addition off of that kitchen space can take some of the pressure off of kitchen having to do all sorts of things. Anything you can do to straighten out a corner or relieve a pinch point of either storage or circulation in a kitchen, maybe by moving a door, maybe by removing a corner of built in base cabinets, can let the rest of the space flow better.
25:19
My last tip isn’t really about space saving at all, but more about opening up possibilities and options for yourself, and it’s really to consider your options don’t get locked in by the footprint you have or by only one solution to your problem. Force yourself to design a kitchen layout that might work better than the new one you have. And then keep going, keep designing alternatives. One thing I do when I’m really facing a snug kitchen space, I’ll tend to keep the kitchen sink where it is, but I will just shift the other appliances around, sometimes willy nilly, sometimes into places that I don’t think they should work. Move the range, move the refrigerator and just give myself as many different alternatives as possible, then go back and see if I can tweak or improve any of them to make them work better, to flow better, to feel functional.
26:11
If I can’t, they get struck from the list. But sometimes I come up with a better solution just by reversing two appliances or shifting something into a former door opening and just trying to work the problem from there. My philosophy as a designer is that I always want to show my clients three workable solutions to any layout issue. To do that, I test way more than three. I try a lot of wrong answers before I get to the right answer.
26:41
And in the end, when I’m weighing which of the three options, I’m going to show I want to show them the three most distinct from each other options, and I want to organize them and scale from the least we might do the tweakiest, most subtle solution to something big and grandiose. When we’re dealing with a really tight kitchen, I tend to choose based on the owner’s preference, whether we want to do one that keeps the kitchen of the same footprint and two that might shift, expand, move, borrow space from other parts of the house, add on to improve the kitchen, or whether I want to do two that keep it in the existing footprint and one that’s our reach solution.
27:16
I do always want to show that contrast of what would it look like to work within the existing kitchen footprint, no matter how snug and what would it look like to blow out beyond it. You have the advantage and the disadvantage when you’re thinking about layout solutions to your own kitchen of living inside your own mind. I have the I can’t see inside my client’s mind. I don’t know everything they want and wish for. I don’t know what unspoken factors or assumptions are going to cause them to reject a design I show them out of hand.
27:48
But I do have clarity in my remove from their innate biases. Experience what they’ve seen before and liked. Sometimes I can surprise them, actually, often I can surprise them was something they either had quickly considered and rejected or something they didn’t even realize was possible. So I get the advantage of being a separate brain from my clients is real. You don’t have that when you’re working for yourself, but you do have the extra advantage of instinctively knowing whether you like something or not.
28:19
I think the best of both worlds for you, as you brainstorm solutions to your own kitchen challenges is to try to put yourself outside of your own preferences and design layouts that you don’t like, just for contrast, just to give yourself something to push back against, you’re never going to solve a true solve a truly snug kitchen space with the first solution that you come up with.
28:42
This is, by the way, a sneak preview of some of what I’m going to be talking about at the kitchen design clinic on Saturday. I will be showing contrasting examples and kind of walking through what my thought process was in getting to them, and also the pros and cons of small, medium and dramatically large solutions for different spaces.
29:01
So if you are listening to this episode, because you have a small kitchen and you wish it was bigger, or you have a small kitchen and you simply wish it worked better, I hope you’ve got some useful advice today, and I really hope we’re going to see you at the mid-century kitchen design clinic on Saturday, May 16, at 11am Central. It’s a two hour workshop that will run long at the end, because I will stay around to answer questions. But if you’ve only got two hours, stay for two hours.
29:26
You can sign yourself up if you have not already gotten your ticket at mid mod dash, midwest.com/clinic, and I will see you there to talk about all things mid-century, kitchen design, find the show notes for today’s episode, plus some YouTube videos showing specific solutions for small, mid-century kitchens that I’ve done as case studies recently that you might find inspiring and helpful, and also just see what I’m talking about rather than hear what I’m talking about at the show notes page that’s going to be at midmod-midwest.com, slash 2404.
30:02
And I will be back next week with a really delightful, long, rambly covering many topics, interview with my friend Atom Stevens, who is a mid-century real estate specialist in Denver. And we’ll be talking about mid-century kitchens, surprise, surprise. And some of the experiences he has when he walks someone into a space they might buy.
30:24
I was curious to find out when he takes someone to a time capsule house, because they asked for a time capsule house. Do that? Do they carry that all the way through to their desire for a time capsule kitchen? And his answer was, it depends. So he’ll tell us more about that next week. I’m really excited to share that with you and in the with you, and in the meantime, I look forward to seeing you Saturday for some deep dives into mid-century kitchen improvements, take care mid mod remodeler.
That’s why my friend mid-century Kitchen Designer Aletha VanderMaas takes every one of her clients on a kitchen field trip.
There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when you stop looking at Pinterest and start touching real-world materials.
No amount of internet research or saved magazine photos can substitute for putting your hands on an object to know if it’s truly right for your home.
This week, I’m thrilled to dive deeper into mid-century kitchens with Aletha! I love her unique perspective on how to do right by a mid-century home while matching it to your modern lifestyle.
17min readDo you need a better kitchen work triangle? Maybe…or maybe it’s completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems.
Odds are, if you’ve ever given serious thought to an upgrade for the kitchen of your mid-century home, you’ve run across the term “kitchen work triangle”.
And if you have issues with how your kitchen works—not enough storage, not enough prep space, no room to share the work, a crowd underfoot at dinnertime every night—you’ve wondered if this mythical concept of a perfect kitchen work triangle is the solution.
Maybe…or maybe it’s completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems.
24min readIf you adore the yards that get featured on the cover of atomic Ranch, but you don’t live in Palm Springs, are you just out of luck?
No, you can still have striking plant structures and beautifully composed outdoor spaces. You’ll just do it with different vegetation. Listen to my most recent conversation with Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio for some great strategies.
41min readIf you are not already a huge fan of the Instagram account, Homes with Max, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that you’ve been doing your algorithm wrong. Let’s fix it.
For today, strap in while Max shares his vintage villain origin story, his favorite features of a time capsule house, and makes such a convincing case for bringing back wall to wall carpet that I kind of end up sold.
I want you to tell me if he’s persuaded you, too!
I know you’ll love today’s chat because I loved recording it. And I know that you, like me, love little more than nerding out over details with a fellow mid-century superfan.
Also, he’s getting back into the business of design advice. So if you need some assistance in re-crafting a perfect MCM time capsule of your own … shoot him a DM!
28min readThis week it’s a bathroom remodel advice roundup to help ease your worries!
Planning the right update for a mid-century bathroom is about space planning and the right product picks, sure. But it’s also about your lifestyle, your morning routine and your five-year plan.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with Master Plan clients and on consult calls recently that caused me to notice some recurring issues and questions, things that come up again and again for a lot of people, which makes me suspect that if you’ve got bath questions on the brain, you’ve had some of the same struggles.
So let’s talk through some of the most pressing issues you can nail down to create a good mid-century bath update for you and for your house and for your style.
37min readAs a designer, it’s so hard to pick a favorite project, but one I’m talking about today has certainly got to be at the top of my list. I recently covered this house on the YouTube channel, because it’s a perfect case study of getting the 90s out of a perfectly nice mid-century home.
Sometimes you find the house in the perfect spot that completes your future dream checklist … but no one has taken the time to revise the 90’s remodel. So only you can really see it’s potential.
Today I’ve invited homeowner, Michelle Cramton, to talk about how we took a shell of a house and turned it into her dream retirement home as she was literally starting from zero after the Altadena fires last winter. I am so happy to share her story of resettling back into her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, and into her mid-century dream.
Her contractors are still tying up the last loose ends so no “after” shots yet but some of these progress photos are looking pretty SNAPPY!.
Settle in to hear Michelle telling you her story of how we met, how we started thinking about this project together, and how we explored her options in a master plan package.
And then had the opportunity to take it further through a bunch of really fun additional services.
She just let me stick with her from the beginning right through until now! We’re currently working on the last final few details of the house. It has been such a treat to get to follow along closely at every step.
You’ll find some photos of this house below. These are recent progress snaps. We don’t have final photos yet, because work is still underway. In fact, in the conversation you’ll hear just a little bit of banging – outside work being done.
If you’d like to see a bit of the design process, jump to the YouTube case study I just made about this house.
48min readAre you familiar with Kerf Design kitchens or bathrooms or wall mounted shelving units? To quote Kerf’s website, “Good joints should be admired. Construction should be simple and honest. We tinker, we improve, and we consider every detail. We love plywood.”
Well, I do too.
If you’re in the market for a Kerf kitchen or just in the mood to learn a lot of interesting background on construction with veneer or plywood materials, you’re in luck.
In this great chat with founder Nathan Hartman, we cover how their designs are manufactured, how the plywood is sourced, different wood grain types, and how this kind of minimalist, sleek, modern cabinet blends in perfectly with the traditions of mid-century history.
I’m also in luck because Nathan perfectly articulated why all of the different members of a design construction team are really valuable.
It works so well for his group to his group to take a project that started with a designer who can handoff to them once the schematic element is well established. Then Kerf’s team take in the project and figure out each detail of kitchen storage and plan for perfect construction before handing off their completed cabinets to a construction team for install.
This conversation is going to give you some insight into built-ins and kitchen design and cabinets generally.
It’s also wonderful insight into the specific process that Kerf uses to create great kitchens that make their homeowners so happy.
27min readYou don’t need to keep a tub for resale value. In fact, about half of my clients don’t.
So much of the advice out there about home improvements is focused on the bottom line, treating your home as a commodity.
And sure, remodeling always has a cost. There are financial factors involved.
But I firmly believe that return on investment and resale value are the absolute last things you should be thinking about when you plan a change to your home. Hear me out.
If you’re planning on selling your mid-century home soon, leave it alone. Don’t do anything to it.
If you’re planning to stay, you are better off focusing on what will make the house your home.
