Kitchens

Most kitchens are sold as a set of units. That is the wrong place to start. The question is how you use the room at half past seven on a Tuesday, and everything else follows from the answer.

What usually needs solving

Bins in the wrong place. A sink you cannot get two people round. An island that looked generous on a plan and blocks the oven door in real life. Worktop you cannot put a hot pan on. A beautiful tap that fights the window. These are the things that make a kitchen irritating to live in, and none of them show up in a brochure.

Kasia measures the room, watches how the house is used, then draws it properly. You see the whole kitchen in 3D before anything is ordered, so the first time you walk into it is not the first time you have seen it.

German kitchens

For handleless, slab-front kitchens, German manufacturing is still the benchmark. Tolerances are tighter, the hinges and runners last, and the finishes hold up to a family. Where that suits the house, that is what gets specified.

Where the house wants something softer, a hand-painted shaker in a proper colour will always beat a gloss slab pretending to be modern. The house tends to tell you which one it wants.

Stone, wood and light

The material palette is where a kitchen either reads expensive or reads ordinary. Book-matched stone on an island. Walnut where you touch things. Lighting layered so the room works for cooking, for eating and for sitting at the end of the day with the big lights off.

Who does the work

Locally trusted tradesmen, the same ones on project after project, managed by Kasia throughout. You have one number to ring and one person who knows the answer.