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While more decorators than you can shake a stick of butter at compare their craft to cooking, designers, unlike chefs, rarely have the luxury of tackling the exact same problem over and over until they get it right. Unless they are like Connie Thompson of Decorating Den Interiors in Washington, New Jersey, who has used her own kitchen as a design laboratory, experimenting with ingredients and correcting mistakes with each subsequent renovation.
Thompson purchased her 1910 house in 1985 and has remodeled her 8-by-12-foot galley-style kitchen and 8-by-10-foot breakfast nook three times, once before moving in and twice since. "The house was owned by an elderly, reclusive woman who had decorated it in the 1930s, and hadn't really changed anything since," she says. "I bought it with all its period furniture and tableware, including a collection of Fiestaware, on which I based the kitchen color scheme." With renovation number one, Thompson addressed the fundamentals: wiring and appliances. "There were only two outlets in the kitchen," she says. "One was in the ceiling." It was too expensive to wire through the walls, so she put up Sheetrock and ran the wiring behind it. "But I lost lots of molding at the window, door, and ceiling." Thompson also replaced all the appliances and the original cast-iron sink.
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 With round two, in 1990, Thompson removed the wall and doorway between the kitchen and the breakfast nook, which allowed her to install divider cabinets from Ikea, doubling the existing storage space. She took down the Sheetrock to re-expose the original walls and moldings, installed ceiling sockets and recessed lighting, applied colorful Mexican tiles to the countertops, and paved the floor with ceramic tiles.
"The third makeover was to correct previous mistakes," Thompson states matter-of-factly. The Mexican countertop tiles, chosen for aesthetic reasons, proved to be too uneven a surface, so she replaced them with smooth granite, but in tile rather than the more expensive slab form. She then overlaid her ceramic floor tiles, which were chipping, with commercial vinyl in a classic black-and-white checkerboard pattern. "I wanted the kitchen to encompass all the periods the house has lived through," she notes. "The black-and-white theme is common to every design era." The kitchen's tin ceiling is a direct link back to the house's origins, while the lime-green breakfast nook adds an up-to-the-minute touch. Contemporary artwork and off-white wallpaper with a thin green stripe reinforce the Now; gauze scrim at the windows recalls the Then.
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Thompson finally settled on a classic black-and-white theme for her
kitchen (above). This third renovation mixes the house's present with the
past through
color and detail, including Fiestaware,
stainless-steel appliances, a mosaiclike
backsplash (top), lime green paint in the breakfast
nook (left), and gauze scrim at the windows. |
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"The backsplash was the most fun," says Thompson, who used a Victorian mosaiclike technique to create the Fiestaware-bright surface. "I broke up colorful garage-sale china and glassware," she explains, "and grouted the pieces in place along with some other mementos of the house's history, including an old-fashioned front door key."
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