Cabin Kitchen Design Plans

Cabin Kitchen Design Plans

Earlier this week, Andy shared with you our cabin kitchen layout plans, and today I’m going to show you what it’s going to look like! This is where it really gets fun (for me!).

While it’s taken us a while to make all our design decisions (and we haven’t made them all yet), one thing we’ve always known about the cabin kitchen is it will definitely not have white cabinets! We did white cabinets in our last house’s kitchen AND our current house’s kitchen, and it’s time for something different! We weren’t sure what color at first and were looking at grey, but the second I saw an image of Philadelphia’s Lokal Hotel on sfgirlbybay’s blog, I immediately sent it to Andy and said THIS THIS THIS! Of course we have to do blue cabinets in the Bay Shore Boathouse!! Why was there even a question?

As you know from our last post, we’re doing an Ikea kitchen again, but since they don’t come in blue, we’re going to get the doors from Semihandmade, which creates doors made especially to fit on Ikea cabinets, in a whole bunch of styles and colors. We decided on Semihandmade’s slab door, which is an appropriate midcentury style, in a color called “night sky,” a really dark navy. We had samples of both “night sky” and their “navy” and “night sky” looked better with all the wood because it has a more grey undertone. (If you’re eagle-eyed you may notice our cabinet sample is actually a beadboard style but we decided against that.)

For the tile, we wanted to do something fun, something era appropriate, but something that doesn’t feel too much like a time capsule. The ’70s got real crazy when it came to backsplash tile, so we want to do our own modern take on it. We chose a 2.5’x8′ stacked tile in baby blue! We thought baby blue was a fun nod towards a lot of the tone-on-tone color blocking done in the ’70s, but with that nautical blue twist instead of oranges and browns… and the cabin has PLENTY of brown already.

For countertops, we decided to do Ikea’s walnut Barkaboda counters. Um, so more brown. Ideally I’d love to do quartz like we have at home, but we have very limited time for installing this kitchen and having someone come out to laser measure after the cabinets are installed and then order the product and then come back two+ weeks later to install is just not an option. We have two weeks total. For the whole install. We need something we can do ourselves, and we can always upgrade in the future easy enough. I drove down to Ikea on Tuesday (four hours round trip with two toddlers) to see and touch the counters for myself. You just never know with Ikea if it’s going to be good or terrible. And these counters are good. I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m still deciding on hardware. I love the look of these brass half-moon pulls… but I don’t love the $42 price tag. We have a tiny kitchen and that would still be over $500! Um. Seriously? I found some good-looking knockoffs from a somewhat sketchy Etsy shop that ships from China for only $7.50 each. Hm. Worth the risk? Or there’s some similar-but-different pulls at CB2 for $17.95 each. Who knows. Maybe we’ll do something completely different.

Oh, but I almost forgot the really fun part: the fridge! The very first decision I made in the house was that it needs a Smeg fridge. And not just any Smeg, but a baby blue Smeg! I’m totally ok with all the shades of blue being different. I think that makes it more fun. And I know it’s more ’50s than ’70s, but, again, we’re not building a time capsule here. I mean, obviously I’ve wanted a Smeg fridge for a long time because they’re adorable, but it actually would be the perfect size for this small kitchen. We are looking at the cabin kitchen as more of a kitchenette than a fully functional kitchen.

tile | countertops | faucet | cabinet hardware | cabinet doors | fridge

So that’s what we know for now about our kitchen design. I’m reserving the right to change my mind about any of this, but I’m really excited about it. I think it toes that line between being sort of nautical, sort of ’70s, and sort of modern. But I want to know what you think??!! Leave us a comment below.