The brief

The owners of this North Yorkshire home wanted a proper new kitchen, designed and fitted from scratch. Something calm and modern that would work hard for family life and still look right in ten years. They had a clear sense of the look they were after, soft sage-grey shaker units, a central island, warm wood underfoot, and wanted it built and fitted to a standard that would last.

What we did

We designed and installed the full kitchen, working the layout around how the family actually use the room. Sage-grey shaker units run along the walls, giving plenty of storage and a classic, timeless look that won’t date the way a trend finish does. We set a range cooker into the run as the working heart of the kitchen, with the cabinetry built around it.

The island is the centrepiece, and we treated it as one. Rather than matching the shaker doors exactly, we clad it in tongue-and-groove panelling in a deeper grey, so it reads as a deliberate feature rather than just more of the same. It anchors the room and gives it a bit of contrast a matched island would have missed.

The worktops are the detail your eye goes to first: a beautifully veined marble-effect surface across the island and runs, catching the light and lifting the whole space. Against the warm wood floor and the softer grey of the units, it’s what makes the room feel considered rather than off-the-shelf.

A full fit-out is a lot of careful work that ends up invisible. Setting out the units dead level and square, getting the island to line up with the traffic through the room and running services out to it, fitting the range and extraction, the sink and plumbing, and making every join and edge sit right. (Measuring twice and cutting once really earns its keep on a job like this. It’s the setting out you don’t notice that makes the finish you do notice look effortless.) We handled the whole thing from design to the final adjustment.

The result

A calm, modern kitchen that suits the room and the people who use it. Somewhere to cook properly, gather round the island and have people over, finished to a standard built to last, and looking every bit like it was designed for the house from the start.