2020 Kitchen Design Award: Erinn V. Design Group

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“The kitchen is also the dining room,” explains Erinn Valencich of Erinn V. Design Group, citing a common challenge with the layout of modern homes. When rethinking this kitchen for an active family, Valencich began by designing custom cabinets that complemented the home’s beach-modern decor while also bestowing an elegance for the wife’s dinner parties.

Valencich commissioned floating shelves whose blackened steel framework stands in for art, creating an elegant view from the living room. Photos by August Dering.
Custom cabinets surround a Dacor gas cooktop. Photos by August Dering.

Serving as an effortless connector of the two spaces, the oak soft gray cabinets—wire brushed and then cerused—evoke the color of driftwood. Hand-cut, book-matched quartzite rises to the ceiling and conceals the stove’s hood. It also waterfalls over the edge of the island, uniting the room. Capping it off is a bleached walnut wood ceiling whose rich hue offsets the kitchen’s cool gray tones. “It really warms up the room,” she enthuses.

Palecek’s barstools and a walnut wood ceiling offer a warm contrast
to the cool gray tones of the hand-cut quartzite that runs up the walls
and waterfalls over the kitchen’s island. Photos by August Dering.
The Nobu dining table and the Cabo dining chair, both in Dawn Oak from the Erinn V. Furniture Collection, pick up the tones of the home’s pale oak flooring. The dining room’s pendants are from David Pompa. Photos by August Dering.

Valencich commissioned floating shelves whose blackened steel framework stands in for art, creating an elegant view from the living room. The dark metal, which finds its echo in the Lawson Fenning sconces, the Dacor cooktop and the Schoolhouse-sourced hardware balances the cluster of brass light fixtures that shed light on the dining table and chairs from the designer’s own line Erinn V. Floor-to-ceiling Fleetwood doors were the finishing touch and open the room to the outdoors. “We wanted the space to be impactful and beautiful and be more of a showpiece than just functional,” Valencich says. Mission accomplished.