3 Interior Designers Transform The Same Kitchen

[Narrator] These three interior designers

have been given a photograph of an empty kitchen.

They have free rein to design it in any way they please.

I'm Noz Nozawa.

I love things to be very practical for you to cook in,

but still infused with fun and boldness and a lot of color.

Hi, my name's Darren Jett,

and I'm a designer based in New York City

who creates compelling and transportive environments

for my clients.

I'm Joy Moyler.

I'm an interior designer based in New York.

And when I'm designing kitchens,

I always look for function, crispness, and some creativity.

[Narrator] No clients, no restrictions, just blank space.

So this is a kitchen.

It seems to be suburban.

It seems to be a little bit dated.

I would suspect that this kitchen was last remodeled,

probably sometime in the mid to late '90s.

The reasons for that are the combined overhead

microwave-range hood combo,

the cabinets in this sort of heavy crown detail

that bring the upper cabinets into the ceiling,

and also the size of these can lights.

Look how big that is.

It feels like overall the house is probably about 25 years

since it's been remodeled.

It looks like it really needs a refresh,

it needs some lightening up, it needs some color,

it needs some texture, and it needs some fun.

[upbeat music]

If we're talking about an eat-in kitchen,

I think it should definitely feel very warm,

very cozy, and very inviting.

So I'm actually sort of leaning into doing a wood kitchen.

This wood does feel a little bit dated.

It feels a little bit '90s in a way.

What if we did something that was more of like a white oak,

perhaps something like this?

Maybe it has a bit of this rustication in it,

so it doesn't feel so plasticky.

But I think that we can definitely improve upon

the positioning of everything.

What if we placed all of the tall cabinetry along that wall?

We already have the fridge over here,

which is in a really nice location, in my opinion.

Perhaps we combine some of the uppers

into some vertical pantry space,

and we would really maintain all of that pantry space there.

And then we could open up

this full wall of cabinets right here,

creating a large, expansive countertop with lowers below.

I wanna lighten up the cabinets.

By a way of having really pretty cabinet faces,

I wanna use a really luxury, like shiny,

but sort of hand-hued brass hardware,

and then also actually lighten things up,

so just have less cabinetry overall.

So we need to have plenty of storage,

we just don't need quite so much of this storage.

So we'll still have upper cabinetry here

on either side of the window.

I think that kind of frames the window nicely.

And then on this wall with the range,

we're gonna leave that open.

So we'll have the range hood coming down from the ceiling,

but then on either side, I just wanna leave that open

and have it all about the tile and the back splash.

I think the thing that really bothers me

about this kitchen

is that it is so overtly dark and heavy-looking.

My plan for this kitchen is to rip out

all of these existing cabinets.

I want to relocate the range and the cooktop over here,

and I want to use this wall for a bank,

our refrigerators and freezers.

And this is going to take the weight of the room.

This elevation is going to become much lighter.

I love mixing the materials and color palette

on the range hood and the stoves,

and I just love that blue range hood

and the shiny red stove.

I think that's such a lovely, delicious combination

in a room

and not very predictable.

What if we did the countertops in an aged brass?

This is a sample here, it's actually called verdigris,

and the verdigris actually has

this beautiful green life to it,

this sort of patina,

that would continue to age beautifully over time.

I'm gonna leave the refrigerator white.

And then over here,

I love the idea of doing kind of an unexpected

earthy aubergine range, I don't know.

And then we'll kind of let the color palette go from there.

And what's cool is even though there are tons

of like ready made RAL powder coat colors,

a lot of these appliance manufacturers

can just color match to like anything.

Powder coating is an incredible technology

that allows you to take metal and then make it colorful

in a way that's actually durable.

I still always wanna have a hierarchy

when it comes to the color density in a space.

That's why there's certain elements

like most of the walls and the ceiling

and the range hood overhead

that need to stay white, in my opinion,

in order for the rest of the color to really sing

and for the kitchen to not feel overly chaotic.

So that's why we've got white appliances,

we've also got a white range hood.

I do wanna do a floating shelf

along the perimeter of the kitchen on both walls.

It would be sort of like a frosted glass, but tinted pink.

If the light from overhead casts through it

that it sort of manipulates the color

of the back splash tile underneath,

I think there'll be a lot of fun. [gentle music]

This is probably a suburban location.

Maybe it has a really nice backyard.

If I had a backyard, I would love to embrace that.

So the first thing I would also do

is perhaps think about opening up that window wall

behind the cabinetry

to really pull the outdoors inside.

I love the idea of doing like a black and steel.

A lot of my clients love black and steel.

There's something that feels very modern about it,

it feels very fresh.

Again, it also would work beautifully with this scheme.

I am widening the width of this window

just so you have a better gaze outside

when you're in the kitchen and you're prepping and cooking.

And the goal is really to bring as much light

into this kitchen space as possible.

Widening the windows and the doors

will definitely aid in that.

I'm replacing this interior door

that leads you into the primary bedroom

with something that has more panels in it.

The additional number of panels on the interior door

is actually echoed in the number of glass panes

in the new French doors that open out onto the deck.

So that's one of the ways that we're sort of getting

more architectural continuity.

And then for this little window, I love it.

I don't know that I would open it,

especially if you've got a brand new range hood

where it can properly vent what you're cooking.

So I'm gonna change this window out

to a little arched picture window.

So you can actually see out into the yard,

you can see out into that view,

and not have all of the mountains in the way of your view.

[upbeat music]

I'm opting to replace this wood floor with some color.

I think it would be really nice to take this entire zone

and lighten up the space,

which right now has a very dark wood.

The floor is not going to be exactly this,

but this is just for reference.

It could be stained,

so you don't have to rip up the entire existing flooring,

but screening it and staining it.

I love an oak floor.

I'm a traditionalist, but I do wanna make 'em a bit fun.

I'm very inspired by classic traditional,

like French countryside and Italian kitchens

with checkerboard floors.

So I'm gonna paint those on the flooring

and we're gonna do it in a bubble on pink.

Just sort of echo the glass color that I'm thinking of

for that shelf around the perimeter.

I am not someone who loves a wood floor

and I suppose right now

I'm someone who loves a wood kitchen,

it could be interesting to have

more of a palladiana floor underfoot.

And a palladiana is really a type of flooring

where it's essentially big and small chunks of marble

and sort of like reclaimed material

that's arranged in a really beautiful way.

These are some samples here that could perhaps work.

Usually it's sort of the luck of the draw

and what you can get from a marble yard,

but I really do quite like having

sort of like larger chunks of black, maybe some white,

and then having some colors mixed in throughout,

maybe some pinks, yellows, blues, perhaps

and creating that sort of organic pattern underfoot.

I'm really excited about using tile

in a multitude of different colors.

Each tile is individually hand screen printed

with different paint colors, glaze colors, et cetera.

So I'm just gonna do like a whole rainbow of colors

from off-white at the ceiling,

coming down and being quieter up top,

and then we sort of get a lot more active.

And all of those colors sort of morphing together,

and that's kind of the abstract playful art statement

in this kitchen,

besides like all the other things.

[gentle music]

We determined that the island could grow handsomely,

and so we added another three feet to it

and we've changed the material so it's much brighter,

it's much more geometric.

It is a stone material.

It immediately feels larger

because it's now a big white mass.

And it really helps to define the kitchen,

where the kitchen starts

and where the kitchen cook area ends.

I wanna make this big.

We're gonna do an egg oval shape.

I love an oval.

I actually just love eggs in general

and then I wanna do like a million legs.

One of the things that I love about legs

is they can just communicate so much

and they can both sort of like close off a space,

but still allow light and air to pass through.

I wanna do it in a semi-precious stone.

This is actually one of the things I love

about slaby yards is,

even though everyone knows about marble,

we all know about granite,

you actually can get lapis lazuli.

And that is what I'm envisioning for this kitchen island,

is the whole thing

is made out of this gorgeous cobalt lapis,

and she's semi precious.

We've got breccia capraia marble countertops

on the perimeter,

and those are a lot more practical for cooking on.

And then maybe the island is more for like final prep.

We have an island here right now.

I would love to join the table with that,

but perhaps we have the cabinets that are high like this.

So it could be interesting

to sort of create this kind of L shape for the island.

But if we started to have a little bit of fun,

perhaps the table takes on this kind of amorphous form

and maybe it's something that is a few inches lower,

your counter heights are about 36 inches high,

your dining height is about 30 inches.

So there'd be a difference.

It's almost like a tectonic plate of some sort.

It's really this form where it works

where there's three chairs

or it works if there's 10

This table that I wanna use in this space

it's by Chris Wolston.

It's like this giant cast bronze brass piece

that looks sort of like molten lava

that just got pushed into the shape of a table.

It's so luxurious.

It's so very organic and bizarre.

It's a small piece, but it's super, super Luxe.

Use it in your eat-in kitchen, why not?

Eat cereal off of it?

Who cares? It's yours.

I've placed an area rug

and it helps to define that eat-in kitchen space.

I love around dining table.

I love it because if you're originally seating four people

at a round table,

you can grow that easily to six people.

Everyone always ends up in the kitchen anyway,

so it's nice to provide as much seating there as possible.

This is a great place

for people to linger when you're cooking,

and you don't feel like you're relegated

to the kitchen by yourself

while everybody else is running them around the house,

have a good time.

[upbeat music]

Having a sofa in the kitchen is just very, very functional.

The fabric selection for the couch, velvet.

I adore velvet, washable velvet.

If you've got a sofa in your kitchen,

you don't want everything else in the room

to be massively heavy.

So I really like using a light frame chair,

something that's really sculptural

to balance out the weight of the sofa.

I love having pieces that relate to one another

without being too matchy-matchy.

Mixing light and dark is just another way

to define the spaces.

So the lighter framed stools are on the island,

which denotes the kitchen prep area,

and then the darker framed dining chairs

denotes the eat-in kitchen section.

And that's another way to visually capture

the functions of these separate spaces

within this one enclosure.

So the chairs are actually also a part

of the dining table set.

So this is the Oro Collection by Chris Wolston,

one of my favorite furniture designers and artists,

and the chairs are really rad.

So they're both upholstered, which may seem really comfy,

but it's also like pieces of brass that are very, very gold

mixed in with like woven wicker.

So it's kind of a traditional wicker chair,

but made extraordinarily strange.

I am personally really excited

about doing something very comfortable, but pretty durable.

I thought that we could go bold and do an off-white fabric

that is a little nubby and quite comfy.

All of these are super durable.

It needs to be able to get scotch-guarded

so that it's antis stain.

And of these three,

I'm currently leaning toward this one the most

because it really actually has

a couple of different tones in it.

So even though it reads off-white,

the sort of like under thread is almost like a cafe brown,

which sort of makes it a little bit more stain camouflagey.

I would love to introduce more of a tan,

and that really lends itself well to that vibe.

Perhaps we do something in more of a Gabriella Crespi world,

the sort of like 1970s, 1960s.

The tan is kind of like sun forms.

Perhaps if it's arched,

maybe it mimics the sort of barrel arches

that we're doing within the ceiling

so it all ties back.

We're always trying to have the architecture

work with the actual furnishings.

[gentle music]

I absolutely love these light fixtures

from Jonathan Adler.

They're a ton of different colors,

a ton of different shapes,

and a lot of different drop length.

And so over the kitchen island

we're obviously doing the lapis underneath,

which is a cobalt blue with like a powder blue up top.

And that one's a bigger whiter spread

that is higher up toward the ceiling,

'cause it's functional light.

And then over the dining table what I'm envisioning,

is doing one that has fewer points of light

and it's more vertical and just comes right down

and comes closer to the table to really anchor

this is the space where you sit and come together,

and that one's pink because pink is part of the kitchen.

I am one who loathes a sort of designer light

or does not really want to put something in a space

that you've seen before,

but there are these lights out there

that they're actually by Ingo Maurer,

and they're actually candle lights

that are on suspension cables that are above the table.

And I would love to do something

that would hang at different levels

that really gives an element of theater,

that really lights the table in a beautiful way.

And whenever someone's sitting there

and they're like leaning back into the chair,

they're like, Wow, that's really cool.

If you wanna live in Harry Potter world, you can.

Because there are so many 90 degree elements in the room,

there's gotta be balance in everything.

And so my immediate approach to the lighting

was to have pendants that had some sort of circular form.

Oh, I selected these large scale domes,

which maybe originally they'd be a little bit too big,

but I just really like how they splay the light

on the island

and has something that becomes very sculptural in the room.

[gentle music]

I personally love decorative paint,

especially when it comes to a kitchen environment

where wallpaper might get messed up,

it might get a little bit of a grease splatter.

And I also like having that come up onto the ceilings,

especially in a lower ceiling height situation.

If you take something on the walls

and you carry it up onto the ceiling,

it cheats the eye to make the ceiling feel even taller.

And so I'm thinking we're gonna run just sort of like

threaded ribbons of gold

that pick up the gold in the hardware that we're gonna use.

We could perhaps talk about sort of barreling the ceilings

in a very subtle way.

Maybe it's a few inches, we kind of drop it.

It's almost like sort of integrated beams

that would frame the windows are arched instead of flat

The ceiling here is really, really flat.

It's got no dimension.

So what I opt to do is to engage newly applied beams

across the ceiling,

which creates a little bit more dimension

in that space over the island

and really just starts to create more zones in the kitchen.

[gentle music]

I'm so excited about this.

Every part of it feels fun.

I know that materials that I put into the kitchen

so I know that we could still use it.

You could still very much eat comfortably in here.

So yeah, I'm very happy with it.

This is a kitchen that I would easily want.

I would cook in there, I would invite my friends.

I imagine this kitchen is a kitchen that would be cooked in.

I imagine people sitting around the island

and sitting around round table

and they're dining and they're having glasses of wine.

Then the dog is maybe on a dog pillow somewhere

taking in all of the antics

and just having a really good time.

And that a kitchen should be functional,

it should be crisp, and it should be fun.

My approach here is really all about

creating a comfortable environment that feels very cool,

that feels like you haven't really seen it before,

but it has all these touch points

of things that feel familiar

and that feel ultimately very cool and very elegant

and very sophisticated.

Yet if you wanna take your shoes off

and if you happen to like spill your wine

and if you wanna go for seconds in the big communal platter,

that's totally fine because everyone's welcome here.

An element of theater, an element of drama,

an element of luxury sophistication,

but ultimately everyone should feel like themselves.

[upbeat music]

Wow! Whoa!

Oh my gosh! Okay. Okay.

Amazing.

I'm such a traditionalist. Wow! Into.

No, I love it.

Wow! [Noz laughs]

Wow. This is bonkers.

I love to cook,

so I really just wanted a kitchen that was functional.

I envisioned this kitchen really for myself

that I could cook in here.

I love it.

I just wanna live here.

This is so beautiful.

And I did something totally different with the layout.

This is so much more open and so much more inviting

just from the direction that you walk into the space.

I love that the blue stain floor is incredible.

I love that so much.

And then you've got these like super delicious,

is this an arm chair or like a big giant bed?

It's a sofa.

Oh my God, I wanna see it. A velvet sofa.

That's my dream. Washable velvet.

Yes, ma'am.

I would move in and I would also learn how to cook.

[Noz laughs] [Joy laughs]

There's a ton of surface, which is amazing.

I love this giant island, all the seating along that.

It really does feel like an eat-in kitchen

and I think that was our prompt.

So kudos, that's really cool.

And I'm also gonna fight Noz over that seat.

Oh my God! [laughs] Yeah.

In my case, not having a client

meant that I could sort of take what I always want to do

in the first round before the ideas get more practical

and just sort of end there.

This would be the kitchen that I would design

for just sort of like a wackadoodle couple

who has lived in this house forever, they love it.

There's a ton of memory there,

but it's time for a refresh.

What are these chairs?

They're amazing. Oh, thanks.

So this whole set is the Oro Collection from Chris Wolston.

They're so cool.

Tell us about these lights.

Oh, yes. They're so interesting.

So this is an LA designer, Jonathan Adler.

I love his work.

They're like little weird geometric worms

that come out of the ceiling,

and we just used like a white one in a client's space

and I secretly was like, oh, I wish I got to use the blue

or the pink one.

They're really interesting.

I like them a lot.

All right.

[Joy] Oh, sleek.

That is sleek. So good.

That's like a boom, boom room pitch.

That's the boom boom.

Boom, boom room comes after this.

This is dinner

and then you go to boom, boom for drinks after.

What I wanted to do with the ceiling in that wall

was to really open it up to the view.

And what's the back splash here?

Yeah. It seems like

it's a different material.

It is, it's a copper pedigree

with a little ledge on top

for plates and soaps, herbs and all of that.

Wine and- And Wine.

Yes. [all laugh]

[Darren] Lots of wine glass. Lots of wine.

[Darren] Lots of wine.

It's a dinner party

so it's ultimately casual but fun too.

I mean, this doesn't even look like

this is the same space.

I think I got a different drawing.

Yours is so much more interesting,

that depth of that window

and the barreling of the ceiling detail.

I love the barrel. That could be aloft.

I love that you went with a full wall.

I wasn't even thinking about like,

oh, you could just actually like use structural windows

and open that whole wall up,

but this is amazing.

I've always wanted to do like a dropped counter

where the island becomes

like a proper 30-inch tall dining table.

It's a dining table, y'all. Yeah.

But I love that you still sort of like brought the wood back

by way of the cabinetry.

It's so funny 'cause like our kitchens

kind of are structurally very similar, right?

I changed to an arch window, like an arch picture window,

but otherwise we're, you know?

Yeah. We have

little sister kitchens

and then yours is like-

The grown up brother that won't let us hang out

or drive us anywhere. [Noz laughs]

Yeah.

[upbeat music]