Kitchen, Private Client, New York

A private kitchen commission in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood, where the brief asked for a space that cooked as well as it looked, one that treated the act of preparing food as something worthy of exceptional materials and genuine craft. The client wanted the discipline of Japandi restraint applied not to reduction but to curation: fewer decisions, each one uncompromising. The result is a kitchen built around a single slab of stone that earns every square inch of the room it occupies.

  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen
  • Japandi kitchen

The marble is the room’s undeniable fact. A full slab of Calacatta Viol, its ground white and cream threaded with veins of amber, grey, deep black, and the faintest blush of rose, wraps the island completely, top and curved sides in one uninterrupted surface. The same stone continues along the run of the wall bench and rises as the splashback, its pattern shifting across the two surfaces in a composition that could not have been designed, only selected. Against the dark walnut cabinetry behind it, the stone glows.

The cabinetry is handleless dark walnut, its grain running vertically in long panels that give the wall behind the bench a quiet architectural weight. Open shelves in lighter oak float above the splashback, holding an arrangement of stoneware vessels, raw, wheel-thrown, imperfect alongside glass storage jars and a small stack of cookbooks. The shelf display is the kitchen’s most Japanese gesture: objects chosen for how they look in use, not how they look when the room is empty.

Above the island, a large rattan pendant in a black steel frame hangs low and long, its woven surface filtering the light into warm amber. To one side, a full-height steel-framed partition in reeded glass separates the kitchen from the dining area beyond, visible through it, a solid timber dining table and bench, and a framed abstract work on the wall. The partition divides without closing, connects without collapsing. A brushed brass tap curves over the undermount brass sink, a sprig of rosemary resting on the stone beside it, the room’s most domestic and most considered detail.