If designing and installing one kitchen is a big project, spare a thought for Jess and her husband Ash who spent lockdown concepting and creating four individual Neptune kitchens for their luxury holiday rental business, Atlanta Trevone, on the Cornish coast.
You may recall reading about Jess and Ash’s family kitchen previously on Stories. The couple built their dream family home on the site of an old bungalow near Padstow and filled it with a stunning white Henley kitchen and a navy Chichester utility room. So thrilled were they with the results of the project, that returning to Neptune kitchen cabinetry was one of the easier decisions when they began renovating a pair of Victorian terraced houses on the waterfront to run as holiday lets.
The first and larger of the kitchens is to be found at One Atlanta. Inspired by the success of their own Snow painted family kitchen, Jess was keen to develop a similar theme for the three bedroomed property. ‘We approached the design by asking ourselves if we could live there,’ says Jess. ‘We didn’t want it to feel like a rental space, more like a wonderful, luxurious family home.’
The brief, which Jess worked on with Becky from Neptune Bristol, was ‘Hamptons beach house’; a blank, white canvas on which Jess could layer interesting antique and salvaged finds alongside her artist great-grandfather JHC Millar’s exquisite seascape paintings. ‘We’d learned a lot from doing our own kitchen,’ explains Jess, ‘and I knew I wanted to use Henley again in Snow – it feels fresh and clean but there is also something so warm and textural about the oak interiors of Henley cabinetry.’
The oak cooker hood is the only exposed wood finish the couple chose to introduce in the kitchen design, but it is balanced out by the original wood floor and Ludlow bar stools. Jess was also keen to incorporate plenty of Henley pan drawers: ‘I love their generous size, they are so big and luxurious, I couldn’t think of using anything else for storage’.
A sense of symmetry in the room was an important consideration. Working with kitchen designer Becky, the couple devised a large island which lined up precisely with the AGA and cooker hood. ‘The symmetry gives the space the wow factor,’ says Jess. It did mean they had to be very exacting when it came to fitting cabinetry into an existing alcove. ‘It was quite a process,’ she recalls, ‘as this is an old, imperfect building so a few millimetres out in our measurements could have been tricky. Luckily, we made it work.’
Finally, but most definitely not last, according to Jess, was the lighting: ‘I believe it is one of the most important elements in the design, but it can easily get lost in budget constrictions. I like to assess the room’s needs at different times of the day and zone the space with lamps and task lighting for those working areas.’ The result? An inviting kitchen at any time of day.