My Berlin Kitchen- Part One
This process has been excruciating. Our beautiful pre war apartment did not come with a kitchen, or any lights, or any cabinets of any kind. Tis normal here. That means however that until we got the keys I couldn't measure or really get down to designing the kitchen. So six weeks of living without an actual kitchen has been pretty terrible, not the worst, but pretty terrible. Luckily the landlord provided us with a little stove and a sink to get us by. My industrious husband found a little refrigerator on Ebay (they use Ebay like Craigslist over here) so we were functional.
Fast forward to today and our Ikea kitchen is being installed. Not without issue but I'll get to that. My main inspiration was this image and the Tobi Fairley designed kitchen from her Riverside Penthouse project.
See more of my inspiration here.
Now onto the kitchen Tobi designed. I normally don't love beige. I do happen to be completely attracted to this tone of beige lately though. It has grey undertones rather than yellow. All of the 90s beige was yellow undertones and it just feels dirty now. But what I truly love is the combo of the beige and lavender. I mean gahhhhh! I've been trying to work lavender into anything for the last couple of years. This lavender as a MODERN accent is very special. Not too sweet. Not little girl lavender.
OK my decision to go with Ikea. While in the states I design custom kitchens with custom, usually job built, cabinetry I just don't have those resources here. Sure I'll get them, but in the meantime we need a kitchen. And we're renting. And honestly Ikea cabinets have the best efficiency and organization for our small space and large needs.
After seeing this Ikea kitchen I figured I could pull off the look in a different but satisfying way.
So after designing it all I realized it was too boring for me. So blah. We can't change the backsplash, it's white square tiles. We have a galley kitchen, nothing like this or Tobi's open concept with island layout. When I laid it out it felt very mom jeans normcore. While normcore is really hot in Berlin right now I'm just not into it. I'm too normcore naturally, it doesn't look stylish it looks Jerry Seinfeld.
So here we are with my plan for a green kitchen. Green! I love green. I had an angel reading a couple of years ago saying I should wear more green and I'm trying to go literal with that, whatever that means.
I incorporated the beige to break up the green. You're looking through the window seeing the radiator BTW. The pantry cabinets step back to leave room for the door to open. We have to have the washer and dryer in the kitchen. Well at least the washer because it needs to use the sink plumbing for water. While I suppose we can put the dryer anywhere with an outlet I prefer to not have a dryer in my bedroom or living room.
The counters are a marble look solid surface material. To be honest I'm not sure what it is. It's not like anything I've seen and no one's been able to translate it into anything meaningful for me. And honestly I don't care. It's a good look, solid surface, and I'm moving on. This shows wood floors but we don't have wood floors sadly. We have white squares. Lot's of white square tile in Berlin.
Well our kitchen didn't turn out like this. Many changes were made on the fly during installation yesterday. They're finishing up today so we'll discuss more soon. Crazy how my inspiration picture isn't at all what I ended up designing. That's how it goes. Take inspiration and make it yours. I'll leave you with a shot of end of the day yesterday. Don't judge.
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