Cramped, Dark Kitchen Opens Up With a Blue-and-White Palette

Kitchen at a Glance
Who lives here: A couple
Location: Lumberton, New Jersey
Size: 204 square feet (19 square meters)
Design-build team: Anne van de Rijn (designer) and Nick Zizzamia (project manager) of Cipriani Remodeling Solutions

Before: The former kitchen felt stuck in time. Short, dark wood cabinets — none reaching the ceiling — made the space feel low and cave-like, and creamy beige solid-surface counters did little to lift things. Storage was a constant frustration. “The kitchen was beautiful in its day,” designer Anne van de Rijn says. “I knew it was a quality kitchen when they originally did it, but it needed to be brightened up.”

The island was a particular pain point — slender, matching the dark perimeter cabinetry, with seating for just two and storage on only one side. A pair of small pendants hung too low overhead. The sink location worked, but across from it a refrigerator shared a wall with a built-in desk that had long since stopped functioning as one. “The desk was the first thing you hit when you came in from the garage, so it became a landing space for clutter,” van de Rijn says.

The cooking wall was equally cramped: Two wall ovens squeezed in on either side of a gas cooktop left almost no counter workspace, and a microwave mounted above the cooktop couldn’t properly ventilate the space. “And it just wasn’t pretty,” van de Rijn says. One bright spot the homeowners wanted to keep: the red oak floor, which they knew would bring warmth to whatever came next.