Our Straw House

House - Kitchen

July - present (Nov 2010)

One of the two main "hang out" rooms in any house is the kitchen. Our house is pretty big, and we wanted a pretty big kitchen. We also wanted the kitchen completely open to the main living area. Mark does the majority of the cooking, and he built the cabinets, so he had a major say in how things were planned out. That being said, Linda is the smart one and fine tuned everything so the kitchen really works for us.

The kitchen has a a LOT of cabinets, including a 8' long island where the cooktop is. Here is a shot of the kitchen with the cabinets in place before being attached to the walls (remember the 2x4s that we embedded in the straw before plastering?)

Now, one of the issues we had was how to get water throughout the house to everywhere that needs it. There are no interior walls that connect the east side of the house (where the water comes into the house) with the west side of the house (where the guest bath and set-tub in the shop are).We couldn't run it under the slab, and we didn't want to run the pipe in the attic. The solution? Run it across the ceiling.

Now, that is uglier than sin, so we knew we needed a bulkhead of some kind. A straight bulkhead would look goofy, but a radiused curve would look better, One weekend when Linda was in BC, Mark came up with this drug-inspired curvy thing that had a constant radius on the living room side and a double curve on the kitchen side. Amazingly enough, it works.

Here are a couple of shots of the more complete (but not done) kitchen. The countertops are Cambria engineered stone. Maintenance free (two of our favourite words). The cooktop is induction (we're geeks at heart).