photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
This airy breakfast nook was once a cluttered keeping room. Now, it provides this family of five with a place to gather for a morning meal, or for the kids to do homework and crafts.
Times change, and so do kitchens. If you’re building a home from scratch today, odds are you’re going to want a space large enough for both family cooking and entertaining guests. But families (and builders) haven’t always demanded so much from the kitchen. In older homes, such as a Chickasaw Gardens dwelling recently renovated by RKA Construction and Elizabeth Malmo Interior Design, the formal dining room was meant for family gatherings and parties, while the kitchen was so small it almost seemed an afterthought.
photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
Before the renovation, the kitchen area was cramped and dark.
But that had to change. The homeowners, who have three young children, needed a more flexible space. “They’ve lived there for a few years,” says Logan Hall Ray, project manager for RKA Construction. “They’re repeat clients, which we love to work with. We did some work on their back porch a few years back, and that’s how we got pulled into this project.”
Elizabeth Malmo is an experienced interior designer who was educated at the New York School of Interior Design and worked as a project manager for A-list designer Miles Redd, where she helped adorn homes from San Francisco to the Upper East Side. “That was really my greatest education,” she says.
Updating the Chickasaw Gardens home presented some challenges. For one thing, it would be occupied for the duration of the project. “In those situations,” Malmo says, “I would normally say move out. Do it all at once.”
But after the disruptions of the pandemic era, the family was reluctant to uproot their children, even temporarily. So Malmo adapted. “The bones of the house are great,” she says. “It’s a very traditional floor plan. But it was flipped about 15 or 20 years ago, so it had lots of travertine, lots of beadboard, very French Country. When we first started, the question was, ‘What rooms can we tackle?’”
“I think the all-white kitchen is going to forever be a classic, but people are being more playful in their finishes. I love color — I’ve always been drawn to color and pattern and a little bit of whimsy.” — Elizabeth Malmo
To avoid long-term disruption, Malmo and RKA planned their moves carefully. “Let’s go room-by-room, if we can, or do groups of rooms,” she decided. “But let’s do it all. They knew that we were going to do all of these spaces pretty quickly — it wasn’t going to be, ‘We’ll do the dining room, and then five years later, we’ll do the living room.’ We started with the entrance hall, and then we moved to the dining room, and then suddenly it became a huge kitchen and bar renovation.”
For RKA, working in an occupied house meant making minimally invasive upgrades. “We did some built-ins in a little mud room area, and we did a few touch-ups here and there throughout the house,” says Ray. “But the main project was the kitchen and the wet bar area.”
photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
The bar with high chairs was added to make the space more hospitable.
Building the Perfect Kitchen
“Everybody lives in their kitchens differently,” says Malmo. “Typically, for our kitchen conversations, we’re sitting down with our builder, the client, an architect, or someone like Old City Millwork, drafting elevations of kitchen layouts. Sometimes, it takes hours to talk through everything that they may be doing in that kitchen. Some people aren’t cooks, so you don’t need a spice drawer,” she continues. “Some people might have a KitchenAid mixer, but they don’t want it out on the countertop. So we might add a cabinet door with a lift where it sits, so it’s able to pop up. There’s so many cool things you can do with your doors and cabinets, but I think it’s important to plan ahead.”
In this case, sitting down with the homeowners revealed that they had fairly simple needs. “One thing we saw on this project is that the homeowners have lived in the space,” says Ray. “They knew what works, they knew what didn’t work.
“They wanted to take the space that they had, lighten it up, and make it more functional. We actually left a lot of the original cabinets,” Ray continues. “We left the appliances in the same space, and used what was there to make it a more functional space.”
The planning stage is when it’s possible to identify and fix some of daily life’s little inconveniences. “I’ll give you a good example,” says Malmo. “In this kitchen, where the dishwasher was placed, you couldn’t have the under-counter trash can and the dishwasher open at the same time.”
A few moments of forethought could have saved homeowners decades of hassle — and Malmo was determined not to repeat such mistakes. “That was such an easy fix,” she says. “There were three cabinet boxes in a row. All we did was move the trash can two cabinets down, so they could use the trash can and the dishwasher together. It was a very simple thing to do.”
But the rest of the kitchen upgrade wasn’t so simple. “In this project, we didn’t have to change anything structurally — we just changed everything other than the structure of the kitchen. It got a total facelift — new cabinets, new countertops. We lifted the case opening between the kitchen and the breakfast room. That opened the room up a little bit more. We added a lot of electrical — different art lights, pendants, and whatnot. But overall, it wasn’t a structural change.”
photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
The white and blue color scheme connects the kitchen and wet-bar areas.
Connecting with the Home
“We didn’t change all the cabinets, we just changed all the finishes,” says Malmo. “Right now we’re doing more cabinetry that’s not all white. I’m working on a lake house at the moment, and we’re doing kind of green-gray cabinets. We have a project in Midtown where we’re doing blue kitchen cabinets, and I think it’s going to be really fun. I think the all-white kitchen is going to forever be a classic, but people are being more playful in their finishes. I love color — I’ve always been drawn to color and pattern and a little bit of whimsy.”
Malmo chose a particular shade of blue for subtle accents, such as the line of stools along the kitchen’s bar. She says a keeping room next to the kitchen had outlived its usefulness. “Originally, that space where the breakfast table is now had a sofa and two club chairs. The homeowners and I talked about it, and they wondered, could we get away from a keeping room situation here? Could we have a table?”
Malmo decided it was better to use the space for a table. “Before, everything felt very crammed in, and with their three children, it became a playroom in their kitchen. Now they have a playroom upstairs, and you can walk through the breakfast nook to the pantry or the wet bar or the family room. It’s kind of forcing the kids and the family to spend time in the family room and not junk up the kitchen area. And now they have a nice place to do homework, too.”
The most dramatic transformation was a little room just off the breakfast nook. “This dramatic, funky wet bar actually used to be a closet,” says Malmo. “We busted through it.”
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photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
The formal dining room of the Chickasaw Gardens home.
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photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
Extensive accent lighting was added to the kitchen area, for both practical and decorative purposes.
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photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
A former closet was expanded and converted into a wet bar, which now connects the living room and breakfast nook.
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photographs by E. Malmo-Goodwyn-Selavie Photography
The homeowners are renovating one room at a time.
Connecting the kitchen and family room areas, the wet bar reversed the kitchen color scheme. The blue is prominent in the room’s patterned wallpaper, while white became an accent color.
“That’s how we usually work, says Malmo. “Even though we didn’t execute their rooms at the same time, we did have a sense of what was going to happen in the next space. I think it’s important that the rooms reference one another. I like to pick a color — whether it’s blue or aqua or green or pink — and have little bits of that sprinkled throughout the house, just so you’re feeling like it’s part of a whole. Then there are moments when I think contrast is important.”
Ray says Malmo’s eye for color was invaluable to the renovation process. “She did a wonderful job tying that space together,” he says. “I think using lighter colors in the kitchen really opened up the space. And then she played with the color in the bar, and that turned out really amazing. Elizabeth took what was there and made a smaller kitchen into a very usable and functional space for the homeowners. The homeowners knew what they needed and we were able to give them that.”
“I loved working with RKA,” says Malmo, “and I adore this family. They’re hilarious and fun, and we really worked together. It was definitely collaborative. I think the design is a good representation of their personalities, so it ended up being a successful project.”
