Kitchen

Inside, a colorful sectional softens the industrial vibe.

Danny Seo replaced the wood cabinets of his kitchen with stainless-steel models. As a professional photo stylist, he needed to accommodate a vast collection of kitchen items, such as multiples of plates, wooden bowls, and utensils.

“I didn’t want marble or granite because they aren’t sustainable,” says Seo. “Laminate is one of the few surfaces recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council toward LEED certification. Plus it’s affordable and I liked the way it looked—a triple whammy.”

A family enlists Brooklyn design-build firm MADE to renovate a brownstone using surplus and salvaged materials for a budget-conscious patina. In the kitchen, the island and cabinets, fashioned from remilled Douglas-fir beams salvaged from upstate New York, sport inexpensive drawers from Ikea.

In a loft renovated by designer Andrea Michaelson, a Liebherr refrigerator blends in with stainless-steel cabinets from Fagor. Flow chairs by Henry Hall Designs and CB2 benches pull up to an antique farm table.

The Feld kitchen bridges eras by bringing together traditional designs and materials (the big Shaw’s Original English farmhouse sink, fir floors, honed marble counters) with industrial designs. Open walnut shelving helps convey a sense of lightness. The pot-and-pan drawers pull out for easy access, while rolling steel-framed panels of textured glass above the counter act as a scrim, allowing the Felds to choose what to obscure and what to display.

Prized possessions such as the old English butcher’s block sit cheek-to-jowl with 21st-century amenities, such as the stacking ovens by Dacor, six-burner Viking stove, and Miele dishwasher.

The Felds’ new kitchen is clean, modern, and laced with industrial touches (laboratory faucets, lab glass pendant lamps designed by Sand, stainless steel appliances) while animated by materials and crafted elements that radiate warmth: fir floors unearthed from beneath two layers of linoleum; a fireclay farm sink made in England; Carrera marble counters that extend up the walls; walnut shelving; and industrial mechanisms that put the hardware on display, such as the suspended rolling blackboard that conceals the water heater.