Previous pages: When is an island not an island?
When it’s also a dining table. That was the
innovative solution architect Neal Schwartz came
up with when presented with a narrow site that
couldn’t accommodate the usual kitchen island as
well as the dining and living areas.
Above: The table height is set in between the
normal height for a table and that for a kitchen
benchtop, allowing it to be used for both dining
and food preparation. Elevated cutting boards can
also be placed on the table to protect the top and
provide a comfortable working height.
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Including an island has become almost
a prerequisite for any new kitchen design.
But what do you do when the space you
have for kitchen, dining and living areas
just isn’t big enough for an island too?
For the kitchen featured here, architect
Neal Schwartz came up with a novel solu-
tion – create a furniture piece that can be
used for both formal dining as well as for
food preparation.
The kitchen is part of major work
Schwartz undertook on a dilapidated San
Francisco Victorian cottage.
“We lifted the original cottage up to
insert a two-car garage beneath and then
added a new house at the back,” he says.
“So you come through what looks to
be a Victorian home into a much more
modern space. You enter into what is
essentially the kitchen, so a lot of the
design had to do with making the kitchen
feel like a nice public space.”
The owners like to entertain, so the
kitchen also needed to be the centrepiece
of that level of the home.
One immediate challenge was the