Sarah's Mountain Escape: Chef's Kitchen

Stream HGTV Canada’s Sarah’s Mountain Escape on STACKTV with Amazon Prime, fuboTV, Rogers Ignite TV and Ignite SmartStream.

Know Your Needs

Renovating is a fantastic way to transform your home and create the kitchen of your dreams. It’s always critical to lay out your objectives, goals, and needs at the earliest stages of a design process. Knowing how you live, and how you want to cook, will help guarantee the best end result. I am a huge fan of a big island. My style of entertaining is casual and engaging. I like to have people in my kitchen with me, and think making a gourmet meal is part of the fun of entertaining and gathering and being together so it’s always more is more in terms of size and space and functions with any island. 

Location is Key

If you are doing an entire house renovation, the first step is to think about the plan for your main living spaces. Is your kitchen where it should be? This is a key consideration to ask yourself at the outset of the project. In the case of Haus Heidi Whistler, the subject of my latest TV series Sarah's Mountain Escape, the kitchen underwent an extreme makeover. Originally located at the front of the house in the turret, I flipped the kitchen from the front to the back in order to create a much more spacious plan. Since this home has six bedrooms and sleeps over a dozen people, the goal was to create a Chef's Kitchen designed for gathering and entertaining. That means lots of space to relax and hang out, with lots of countertops to create multiple prep zones.

Favour Functionality

When designing a kitchen island, I like to make sure it works for casual dining and conversation so there is an L-shaped layout for the stools that wrap around the corner and creates a restaurant bar effect. Function and practicality are always at the top of my list so this island features two dishwashers. Ready to tackle all the mess that goes along with over a dozen guests and one of my signature Kitchen design moves is to install a stone carpet accent in between the cooking area and the sink/dishwashers. The rest of the kitchen features wide plank, European white oak floors, but a home and stone pad in between the sink in the oven ensures that the floors don’t get damaged with the mess generated by cooking and cleaning up.

Embrace the Unusual

The funny quirk about this home is that the back wall of the house is on an angle… Not every kitchen has an irregular shape, but this one does! So instead of trying to ignore it, I think it always is best to embrace the unique and unusual features in your home. I designed an irregularly shaped island to follow the angled wall of the back of the house. When designing, it’s also important to know your materials and their limitations. Quartz countertops only come so big and I wanted to create a kitchen island that was bigger than the slab size available, so I decided to link to slabs of courts with a racing stripe accent in a different color. To me this adds a graphic element to the island and unifies. The colour is used throughout the kitchen. 

Experiment With New Ideas

When I design, I love to experiment, and my own home is always the best place to try. New ideas. In this case, I reinterpreted a Schluter tile edge in satin brass as an accent strip running underneath the countertop. It’s a subtle ribbon of soft brass, the ties together the hardware, the accents on the pendant, lights, and Adds an extra contemporary touch to finished product. The best part about experimenting in my own home is that if it works… I’ll try it again in a client's home.

Style Meets Longevity

When designing an island or thinking about the overall concept for your kitchen renovation, you’ll obviously need to consider whether you want a traditional or contemporary look, but I also like to consider long term, durability and maintenance. Since this is a rental house designed in contemporary alpine style, I used a slab door from Kitch. A simple, flat panel door is easy to maintain, wipe clean, and will look better in the long-haul then a more decorative door style with a recessed panel. When you’re designing your kitchen, it’s important to think long-term. I like to make choices that I feel confident, I will still love in a decade or more.

Let There Be Light

Classic lighting, layout above an island is two or three pendant lights. But there’s no rule that says you need to follow convention! Instead of doing the usual, I opted to try something different, and installed a grouping or a trio of sculptural pendant lights at different heights that hang down And anchor the seating area at one end of the island. This house is located in the mountains in Whistler BC so at every turn, I tried to incorporate inspiration from the natural landscape that surrounds the house. These textured, frosted glass pendants reminded me of melting, ice or snow. For me, it’s not about themes, but subtle references to The natural surroundings