The brief

The owners of this York home had a kitchen that no longer matched the way they lived. Plenty of houses round here have the space, they just have it carved up into small, dark rooms that made sense a hundred years ago and don’t now. The ask was simple to say and a fair bit harder to deliver: one big, bright, open kitchen and dining space that could handle everyday family life and still look the part when people came round.

What we did

We opened the space right up and put a large roof lantern in over the dining area, which is doing most of the heavy lifting in that room. Even on a grey Yorkshire afternoon it pulls daylight down into the middle of the house, where an extension can so easily end up feeling like a dim back room. That lantern was the first thing we planned and everything else worked around it.

The kitchen itself is handleless grey shaker units run along two walls, with a central island housing the sink and giving people somewhere to gather that isn’t in the way of whoever’s cooking. We fitted solid oak worktops throughout, and the island top is our favourite detail on the whole job. Rather than a plain straight run, we laid it in a herringbone pattern, each piece cut and set by hand. (This is where 30 years of joinery earns its keep. You don’t get that finish from a flat-pack worktop.)

We kept one original oak beam exposed across the ceiling. It’s a small thing, but it ties the new space back to the age of the house and stops the whole room reading as brand new. The marble-effect splashback and the patterned monochrome floor tiles were the owners’ choices, and they’re bold ones, which we’re all for. A kitchen should look like the people who use it.

Underneath the finish, this was a full renovation. New electrics and lighting, the recessed spots and the extractors, integrated ovens and an induction hob, plumbing for the island sink, and all the making good that a job like this quietly needs and nobody ever sees.

The result

What was a set of tired, boxed-in rooms is now a single space the whole family actually uses. Somewhere to cook, eat, work at the table under the lantern and have people over, all in one room that feels twice the size it did before.