On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:10:46 -0500, Existential Angst wrote:

( RCM-ers.... skip down to the alum. plate section)
(RW peeple -- stop whining..... yeah, I know, it's not wood, it's
anti-wood,
deal with it)

Awl --

Since ahm fixin up m'shop, The Wife is REALLY bitching about her
kitchen....
tit for tat, I spose.... no pun intended.... but an excellent pun,
eh?? LOL

With a hypocrisy worthy of the basest politician, I'm going thru the HD
kitchen design route (or at least the motions), mostly to get familiar
with the "process" of "new kitchening", not necessarily to actually let
them do it. My fillings are already hurting....

Inyway, sumpn is not right in KitchenDee-zineLand...... 'sall
beautiful, 'sall archy-tecky, but sumpn is just not right.

Stunning as all this HGTV stuff is (more like culinary dick-waving),
I'll bet that only 1 out of a 100 of these McMansion kitchens are
actually used to do any real cooking. I'm betting that with alladat
1.25" granite all over the place, the ****ty li'l brats run in and
toaster-up their PopTarts, and everyone else is re-microwaving
yesterday's KFC and pizza.....

Oh, and old news: alladis**** is SUPER expensive..... *gratuitously*
expensive (and complicated), in my deezine opinion.

This notion solidified when I happened on, iirc, a NYTimes-ish profile
of a big-dick chef and his SoHo-ish home/loft kitchen, where I was
struck by just how non-archy-tecky it was, yet a thoroughly functional
and very funky-attractive kitchen.... a REAL kitchen??
Nothing matched in it, none of this bull**** HGTV ""design"", altho he
was
blessed with very high ceilings (*at least* 12 ft, it seemed), and a
goodly large space.

Dats when my inkling that HGTV was 99% fulla**** changed to 100%
fulla****. A conjob, actually, like pretty much everything else on TV.

The Q at hand is how to juggle wall space, ito cabinetry vs. open
shelving. Attractive as all these kitch cabinets are, I just never found
them to be all that practical, except for mebbe dust protection.

Recently I discovered these
http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/prod...3572526&RN=204 (or
google Oggi, flip-lid canisters), which are really very attractive, and
*visually useful* ito of retrieving foods, assessing quantities, etc.
These further make the case for more open shelving In addition, many
kitchen appliances are attractive in their own right, as can be the
dinnerware itself, utensils, etc. Ceiling pot racks, imo, are Da Bomb.

So the Q is, How to apportion trad'l cabinetry, with open shelving?

I am in a semi-unique position in that I have a design for, and have
actually built, shelving out of 1/4" alum plate, super-elegant,
minimalist, functional, versatile, and strong. The soon-to-arrive Haas
GR510 gantry mill will make this plate work much more do-able, as well.
This style shelving (wall mounted or freestanding) also lends itself to
being very elegantly enclosed, with hingeless doors that pivot on pins.
These g-d European hinges drive me crazy.... just how complicated can
**** get????

So I can actually make a "themed" kitchen of open/enclosed storage, in a
variety of textures, from anodized to brushed to polished (SS-like)
alum..

Has anyone grappled with this aspect of design, closed vs. open storage?
Any web sites that deal with this, and the notion of "strategy"?

The problem with (traditional) kitchen design is that there are no
do-overs -- you are essentially stuck with the whole shebang.
One thing I learnt with all this granite bull**** is that what looks
good
in a showroom or sample book may not fare so well over time, when yer
eyes are just SATURATED with these visually complex granite patterns,
which actually become otically numbing after a while, and do a good job
of HIDING dirt, spills, grease, etc.

I learned this by raiding the dumpster of my local granite guy, who
allowed me to take substantial pieces of granite, silestone, marble,
which I spread throughout the existing kitchen as trial countertops. We
realized that you had to be *really* careful in your choices, and that
most choices would be regretted. We realized that if going the granite
et al route, a single color/pattern would become visually oppressive.

Thusly, I have also come up with a design of anodized alum plate
countertops, covered by simple 1/4" beveled glass. Or, for that matter,
butcherblock-type motif, covered by 1/4" glass. If the glass ever
breaks, cracks, no biggie, go to the glass store. Really a lot of design
potential there. And economy.
**** Granite.

Lastly, ito enclosures (cabinets), there is the notion of see-through or
translucence of the doors. The leaded-glass effect is very nice, and
can also be facilitated in a gantry mill, in wood or in 1/4" alum plate.

The Q is how to sift thru all of this.
Oh, yeah, a bit of a hard sell to the Wife.... LOL Thoughts, idears,
experiences?

Our kitchen counters are all tile. If we're holding a hot pot and we say
"I need to put this thing down NOW!!! WTF can I put this thing?" the
answer is always "anywhere that's flat". And I mean anywhere in the
whole kitchen, because the whole kitchen counter is tile.

You cannot imagine the convenience of that until you've lived it. That's
one thing that stone would give you. I'd suggest that if you use glass,
use tempered glass and test a sheet of it with a pot roast fresh from the
oven. I would be suspicious of aluminum -- it'd spread the heat both
down into the underlying glue and across the counter to whatever is close
by (like, say, your hand).

The tile is patterned, but it's much less aggressive than granite, and
it's light colored. It's also textured, which is a pain if you're
kneading bread -- marble would solve that problem, though, and still
provide the "everywhere is a hot pad" goodness.

--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com