Just because your kitchen is on the smaller side doesn’t mean you can’t make it as efficient and effective as possible.

A double bowl sink is also quite self-explanatory, created either out of one large sink with a divider or from two distinct bowls framed into a single sink.

Their creative confections may ruin our diets, but we’re happy to be their taste testers anytime.

“The client wanted an interior space where you could read the materiality of the building elements like understanding the ingredients in a recipe,” principal architect Elizabeth Webster explains. The extension features distinctly textured materials: an exposed timber ceiling, painted brick walls, and polished concrete floors. Warm lighting by Brinklicht unifies the space.

The architect placed the windows at Sabrina’s eye level so that she’d be able to see her son, Rocco, playing in the yard outside. "You can feel the seasons changing here," says Chiavelli. "I grew up three miles from here, outside in nature. This is a house for experiencing life."

Black and white kitchen cabinets painted with a triangular pattern add a whimsical touch to this funky kitchen.

"Overall, it is important to me to build in change into the kitchens I design. Via fabrics, artwork, and useful storage on shelves and elsewhere, this kitchen can change its look easily," Serra says. "Wall cabinets can be hung and later removed as desired as well. This kitchen is very flexible."

Serra's design firm, Bornholm Kitchen, creates custom cabinetry, which is fabricated in Pennsylvania. For this conceptual space, she opted for robust solid walnut with an oil finish. "The oil finish is easily refreshed," she says. "Scratches can easily be rubbed out with sandpaper and if the surface is re-oiled, it looks like new. Every so often, years down the road, the cabinetry can be lightly sanded and re-oiled—or just re-oiled—for a brand-new look, which is extremely rare in kitchen cabinetry."

Serra sourced the handwoven vintage runner in front of the cooking area from Europe. For her Scandinavian Made business, she travels to Scandinavia to scout for rugs and ceramics from small artisans or from vintage shops. The refrigerator is by Sub-Zero Wolf.

For the sink area, Serra specified American Standard's Orchard Apron sink in white. The faucet, also by American Standard, is the pull-down Fresno Culinary model. Muuto's Fluid pendant light is suspended from the ceiling.

Visiting a Manhattan apartment designed by Tim Seggerman is like sitting inside one of Nakashima’s cabinets, a metaphor realized most fully in an ingenious "library"—really a glorified cubby with a banded maple ceiling, conjured from a free space adjacent to the loft bed.

The home abuts a river, where the residents enjoy kayaking and swimming in warmer months. This geographic blessing partially inspired the wave-like backsplash. Each tile was hand-cut and individually placed by artisans from New Ravenna.

For the kitchen, Tyler hired David Restorick, a furniture maker and friend, to build an island for storage and to wrap Ikea cabinets with oak for a customized look. He also built a staircase that doubles as display space for Tyler’s vast collection of colorful cookware by the likes of Finel, Copco, Cathrineholm, Jens Quistgaard, and Stig Lindberg.

The budget was nearly as tight as the space in this cheerful renovation of a 516-square-foot flat in Bratislava. The centerpiece of Lukáš Kordík’s new kitchen is the cabinetry surrounding the sink, a feat he managed by altering the facing and pulls of an off-the-rack Ikea system. The laminate offers a good punch of blue, and in modernist fashion, Kordík forwent door handles in favor of cutouts. “I wanted the kitchen to be one simple block of color without any additional design,” he says.

Omer Arbel, the creative director at industrial design firm Bocci, was given three parameters when he began designing a home for his colleague Randy Bishop: Create a “profound” connection between the internal and external spaces; build only one level; and, most crucially, utilize a wealth of 100-year-old beams salvaged from a series of warehouses owned by Bishop’s ancestors.

A single bowl sink is self-explanatory: it consists of a sink that is not divided up into separate areas.

O’Sullivan designed the ceiling “to have a knitted or woven quality like that of wool or silk.” It dives down over the kitchen and dining area, eventually reaching a point at the entry that is low enough to touch. Here, resident Jes Wood leans against the onyx kitchen island while her daughter Ruby hangs out. Replica Jean Prouvé chairs surround the dining table; a vase by Bruce and Estelle Martin for Kamaka Pottery sits on top. The Reel table under the television is by Atelier Oï for B&B Italia.

By inserting a tunnel made from 36 reclaimed commercial doors and tearing down a handful of walls, LOT-EK and contractor Andreas Scholtz brought light into the formerly unused dark hallway in Maurice Russell (right) and Jorge Fontanez’s apartment. The glossy Safety Red paint by Benjamin Moore catches the light by day but “becomes a richer, darker, very relaxing red at night,” Fontanez says.

The chromatic Paris apartment of Jean-Christophe Aumas holds a treasure trove of rare vintage furniture, displays from his work, and items curated from his travels. As the artistic director of the creative agency Voici-Voilà, he designs store windows and special events for clients like Louis Vuitton, John Galliano, Lacoste, Céline, and more; and so it’s no wonder that his own 1,023-square-foot apartment is teeming with character. The entire flat is self-designed in a fusion of his professional and personal flavors. Over herringbone wood floors, walls with painted shapes frame hanging artworks; colored cubes, created for a Sol LeWitt–themed Louis Vuitton display, pepper the space; and foraged furnishings ranging from flea market finds to designer pieces outfit the home.

The kitchen was custom made by a local carpenter due to its unconventional scale. The appliances consist of a De Dietrich oven, Amana refrigerator, and Imperial microwave.

The top of the house is dedicated to a dining area and a kitchen outfitted with steel-topped cabinets from Sanwa Company. Read more about this dimensional three-storied Japanese home here.

For this kitchen, the architects paired slate-gray HPL (high-pressure laminate) cabinets by Henrybuilt, cool Basaltina countertops, with custom shelving and a white Corian backsplash.

Guess used inexpensive graded pine plywood so that he would get heavy grain patterns on the surfaces. One of the main goals in the kitchen was simplicity. To that end, he opted for a poured-in-place concrete island. "We didn’t know if we could afford to do that, but we found a great subcontractor [Nate Francis of Countertop Creations] here who had never really built anything like that," Guess says. "Because he was interested in giving it a shot and adding it to his portfolio, he didn’t charge an exorbitant amount of money because it was sort of an experiment for him as well." The kitchen features a GE Profile refrigerator and KitchenAid range, microwave, and dishwasher. The sink and faucet are from Kohler. The project's builder was Joe Doherty with Custom Homecrafters of Austin.

All of the Jenn-Air appliances, including the washer and dryer, are electric, as the owners asked the city to cut the gas line to the house. The kitchen cabinetry is from IKEA and features custom, matte-gray doors and Silestone countertops. The floorboards are reclaimed maple from an old tire factory, sanded and stained gray.

Christine (at left), and Amanda (at right) chat with David’s sister Aroha Yates-Smith (center) in the kitchen.

The concrete wall mimics the slope of the hill outside as a reference to early Maori structures that were dug into the land. The simple kitchen has strandboard cabinetry and an MDF island that conceals a fireplace at one end. The ceramic works on the built-in seat at right are by Raewyn Atkinson and Robyn Lewis.

Sherman’s friend Anna Chang prepares tea in the kitchen. The range is by Wolf. Walls are coated with parging, a type of concrete made with sand instead of gravel—-more typically used in an industrial context.

The property is comprised of a succession of buildings that extend from the street-facing entrance. The 1,215-square-foot main house is the last of the three.

The clients had an impressive collection of Scandinavian midcentury teak furniture that now pops beautifully against the concrete floors, white-painted brick, and pine v-joint walls.

A consistent wood palette makes the interior feel cohesive.

The residents love to entertain and cook, so 590BC worked to create a kitchen that was functional and aesthetically pleasing. "It is complex and considered down to the most minute detail, but still reads as simple and clean," Breitner says. Photo by Frank Oudeman.

About her collection of cookware, Tyler comments: “I use accessories as the color in spaces so these items are an integral part of the overall design."

The Mt. Buller Home of Andrew and Tiffany Percy and Family via the Design Files.

In the living room, spare Scandinavian design takes center stage. Hans Wegner’s Wishbone chairs surround an Essay dining table by Cecilie Manz for Fritz Hansen; a mostly wood palette is enhanced by slate-gray brick around the fireplace. The paper lanterns throughout the home are a mixture of classics by Isamu Noguchi alongside those picked up in Japan and France.

The kitchen features Ikea Sektion cabinets and Whirlpool appliances. The dining area contains a table from CB2, a George Nelson pendant, and Eames molded fiberglass chairs that were picked up at the Alameda Flea Market.

Pippa (left) and Maisie (right) play in the kitchen. Though Hale and Edmonds would have preferred Bosch appliances, a deal at Ikea was too good to pass up. They purchased all of the cabinets and appliances (a combination that earned them 20-percent off the total) for a mere $4,700.