Space of the Week: A Designer Gutted Her Kitchen—Then Made It Feel Like an English Cottage

Designer Valeria Jacobs thinks big, which is why the original kitchen in her California home wouldn't do. It had its charms, of course. A black-and-white checkered floor coordinated with shiplap on the walls and starburst lighting details on the ceiling, but it had one big problem: It was small. "Our previous kitchen was half the size of the current one," she says.

The room was contained to one corner of her family home's ground floor, and a peninsula cut the small space in two. "It's a long room but not too wide, so it was tricky to design a new layout without doing something traditional like an L-shape or a galley," Jacobs says. "I wanted to use the whole space without making any big structural changes." That's because her life is as big as her design plans. Jacobs has been with her husband Paul since they met in high school, and when he's not working as an engineer, he helps craft her latest designs. They're raising three young children and also care for two dogs. So as they considered fitting everything and everyone into a new kitchen, they felt that the only way to make it work was to start over.

"We did a complete gut job," Jacobs says. "I admire the English design style, especially English cottages, and the mix of eclectic and timeless features are my favorite. I wanted the kitchen to feel lived in and full of character."

The old drop ceiling was removed, a new gas line was put in, and the sink was centered under a window before Jacobs later wrapped the lower half of the wall with IKEA cabinets covered in custom fronts. After, they built a custom hood, reframed the walkway to the dining room so that it flowed under an arch, and installed herringbone wood floors. Jacobs also constructed an island and hung new pendant lights. But if all of that doesn't sound like enough, it's because it wasn't. She also envisioned a vintage cabinet to bookend the room.

"After looking for [a cabinet] for over six months, I couldn't find anything that had the right dimensions for that wall," she says. "So I decided to use an IKEA Havsta cabinet and made it look like a vintage one. I created a custom molding box that mimics the molding on our vent hood to give it more height." She painted it in the same sage shade as the surrounding cabinets and added peel-and-stick wallpaper in a classic William Morris print to finish it off. With that, her kitchen lived up to her big plans and was mostly completed in a little less than a year.

"I am so proud of the kitchen we were able to create," she says. "We didn't rush any decisions, and made progress little by little as ideas came to mind. It turned out so much better than I imagined."

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