The Kitchen
For the kitchen I thought about sending the simple message of recycling. I figured I wouldn’t be available to talk to every single person who’d walk through the exhibit so I wanted the message to be pretty self explanatory.
I found a company out of Plano, Texas called EnviroGlas and they make the neatest countertops out of crushed bits of just about any recyclable material you can come up with. Everything from old bottles, to toilets, bathtubs, windshields and mirrors; they break them up into little ¼” – ½” chips, mix them in with a resin (you get to choose the color and there are tons to pick from) and create slab countertops. They also make the material in Planks that can be used for flooring. They are so incredibly cool and super stylish! On their website you can see the funniest picture of their plant in Texas and right next to it is this enormous field filled with old broken porcelain toilets and bath tubs, I thought what a creative person to look at that and be able to envision making something so beautiful out of them.
I fell in love with the glass color combination of the brown beer bottle chips, green wine bottle chips and clear bottle chips. Chocolate brown and lime green is a very hot color combination right now and I knew this would add great color to the space as well as send a self explanatory message…you look at the countertop and you can clearly see it’s little bits of broken glass, it sends the recycle message loud and clear and it looks fantastic!
The countertops were the springboard for the design. Now I had green and chocolate brown in place.
The next big element would be the cabinet material…that’s one of the biggest components in the design of any kitchen. I thought a natural bamboo would look great with the brown green combo but I’ve never used it as material for cabinets.
We were lucky enough to have a company called Bertch Cabinets come on board the Living Green Tour and they make gorgeous cabinets out of a material called PlyBoo. PlyBoo is lightweight, yet sturdy, plywood made from bamboo. I’ve used a lot of bamboo in my previous designs but didn’t know why it qualified as a green material and I learned that bamboo basically is a grass. It grows much faster than wood and is actually fully renewable in just about 5 years. If you’ve ever had bamboo in your yard you know how fast it grows and how much it spreads, harvesting this is much less invasive to the planet than cutting down a bunch of trees (that take many, many years to fully grow) not to mention how wonderful bamboo looks in your home. I think of it as sleek. The soft, natural yellow undertones will add a warm and inviting feeling to any room.
The next step in the kitchen design was to choose the floors, I knew the counters would be light resin with the colorful bottle glass; the cabinetry would be the light PlyBoo so I decided that a rich dark brown on the floor would add great contrast and really help show off the cabinets. Contrast is important in any space to add depth and dimension, if everything’s the same color and tone you can get a sort of “Blah” feeling to your overall design. Think in terms of mixing light and dark, they will each help show the other one off, in this case the light cabinets highlight the richness of the floor and the floor shows off the cabinets.
In a kitchen you are really on your feet a lot and so I decided to go with a dark chocolate brown cork floor material from Natural Cork and More Flooring. Cork is cushiony on your feet when you walk on it, it helps baffle sound (and kitchens can be noisy) and it’s treated (it’s not like a raw unfinished wine bottle cork) so it’s incredibly durable. Cork is a byproduct of the bottle stopper industry and it’s easily harvested so it doesn’t disturb other trees that might be surrounding it.
My next choice was to pick a material for the backsplash and I wanted something that would work with the countertops and the cabinets but I also wanted it to be a real focal point to the space. The backsplash is always an opportunity to show a lot of style and have some fun in your kitchen design, you can make a bolder statement because it’s really just the small area between your countertops and the wall cabinets. I thought I’d do a combination of glass mosaic tiles in my theme colors of beer bottle brown, bottle green and clear glass.
I found a company called Susan Jablon Mosaics and they make the most fantastic glass mosaic tiles. Susan has created a collection called Organiks and it’s 1”x1” glass tiles in every color you could imagine and they are all made of 100% recycled glass, a lot of the glass coming from car windshields. How brilliant that someone created a gorgeous product from something that otherwise would be totally wasted.
Susan worked with me on creating the perfect color combination and in addition to the colors I had in mind, she added some stunning white and dark green/brown iridescent tiles that made the entire mix sparkle! In working with mosaic tiles you have the option to do a lot more than use just one solid color. There are many patterns you can create and we did what is referred to as a “blend” pattern, which simply means blending several different colors in your color scheme together to give a random design.
At this point I was really excited with all the beautiful elements that were going to be in the kitchen, and oh, by the way, they are also “Green”!
Kohler came on board the project and let me choose items from their water saving collection. I chose a tall gooseneck faucet, which not only saves a boatload of water but the height of the faucet allows you to fill large pots with ease.
Bosch worked with us as well and we used their EnergyStar dishwasher, oven and refridgerator. I loved the brushed stainless steel finish and thought it would go great with the sleek lines and would be a nice, cool contrast to the warmth of the natural PlyBoo cabinetry. Bosch also supplied the hood over the stove and it’s so good looking, the glass top combined with the stainless steel really adds to the overall feel and updated design of the space.
Lee Furniture has a collection called NaturalLee and they use furniture frames that are Forestry Stewardship Council certified, as well as water based pieces, soy based cushions and organic, natural fabrics. They have this really cool counter bench that I just adored, half stool, half sofa and I thought it would be perfect in front of the island and more innovative than just using regular old stools. I chose the wood finish of the legs to be dark wood which would be a nice contrast in front of the light PlyBoo cabinetry. I used a subtle tan graphic patterned fabric that wouldn’t compete with the countertops or the backsplash but spiced it up a little by adding a dark brown contrast welt (I LOVE using contrast welt). I used a soft sage green color on the walls and we used VOC paint, which is paint that has fewer toxins.
I knew throughout the entire exhibit there would need to be signage giving visitors information about green building materials as well as easy things people can do to save energy, water, paper and other natural resources. I really wanted to come up with innovative ways to give these messages and something more fun than just a bunch of placards placed all over the spaces telling people what they should do to live a more green lifestyle.
One of the most important elements of what an interior designer does is after everything is placed in a client’s space, the designer then comes in and “styles” the space. Styling is how you place all the little accessories and special touches that make a house feel like a home. Whether it’s placing items perfectly in a wall unit, hanging pictures or setting items on a coffee table, these are the things that give you that inviting feeling. I knew this exhibit was going to travel to 15 cities over the course of several months and I would make the construction people insane if I made them place a million little accessories every time the exhibit needed to be put together, not to mention pack it all up when it needed to be dismantled. I knew it would still need some accessories to have a homey feeling so I came up with the idea of having the signage incorporated into the accessories. I needed hardworking accessories that would look great but also deliver the messages that we wanted to share with everyone.
The glassware in the kitchen is from a company called Green Glass and they are glasses and carafes from the “topaz collection” which are made out of old chardonnay wine bottles, they are such fun! We had messaging fired onto a dinner plate (resting in a bamboo dish rack), tips embroidered on dish towels, tips printed and placed inside glass countertop canisters, information on the refrigerator door as if it were a child’s artwork; we wanted it to feel a little bit like a scavenger hunt! Green Works, which is Clorox’s new natural cleaning line, uses lots of lemon in their kitchen cleaning products so we even put small stickers that said Green Works on a bunch of lemons in a recycled glass cylinder on the island. (Green Works uses over 99% all natural ingredients that are just as strong and as effective as traditional cleaners and they cost less than $4 dollars).
The scavenger hunt approach to signage was a way to style the space but keep in mind the whole reason for building the exhibit which is to show people how easy and stylish living green can be!
The bathroom is next.
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