First, the layout - with a corner sink!
I don't have the elevation plan, but here's how it looks, reading clockwise from the left of the window:
Small bookcase in the corner (facing the sink - you'll see a deco panel), to hold the toaster oven and cookbooks. 30" wide drawers below (silverware in the top, pots etc. below)
Crown molding over the window (and over all the cabinets too). No soffit or space - the cabinets go up to the molding which goes up to the ceiling.
Under the sink there's a door (with a garbage bin attached to the inside, and mostly useless pipe space beyond). Then comes a cute spice/oil pullout rack. Then the dishwasher (trim panel), then the stove (I bought the Fisher & Paykel stove after all, overstock-inventory, not as amazing a deal as the fridge but close). Then a little stack of 12" wide drawers for utensils, potholders, etc. Then the built-in fridge.
The top cabinets on the opposite wall are 42" tall, and they go wood, glass, glass, wood, microwave, wood, fridge, from window to door. (Not quite the way they're labeled on the diagram.)
The door style is this but in maple with a medium-light honey stain and no dark contrast lines:
I know, not what I thought I wanted at all. But I decided that it's more important to go with a really good cabinet company than to have custom doors. The cabinets are Luxor, made in Canada (there are pictures on the website of Canadians operating well-guarded machinery). My cousins in Staten Island all have them (same contractor) and they've been thrilled with them for years. Everything seems very high quality - all real wood, dovetails, self-closing hinges and drawers, etc.
I also decided that I'd rather have traditional cabinets - which will still look traditional in ten or twenty years - than modern euro slab cabinets which will look dated (and which kind of bore me, and then I'd need those modern bar handles, but the only ones I saw that I like are $150+ a pop.)
The drawers will be a slightly different style - it's a companion style really; where the doors have raised panels in the center, the drawers will have recessed panels, but all the other millwork is the same. Raised panels with handles look too busy on shallow drawers, of which I'll have several. (That's one of the things I like about my contractor - he's always thinking about details like that.)
I'm going with maple because 1) I like it, 2) everyone has cherry, and 3) I've got my grandmother's 1940's dining room set now, and it's maple.
And then there's the stone.
I went to a granite and marble place a few weeks ago, and didn't like anything. Well, I liked the white marbles okay, but I also like tomatoes, lemons, soy sauce, and vinegar, and I want to use my kitchen. (Although, as my contractor says, the Europeans use marble all the time and they cook too.) I ended up falling in love with a slab of pressed recycled glass, which is in fact how I fell into the ultramodern euro slab cabinet tangent for a few weeks. (Stop a minute and click on that link - it's the most stunning otherworldly stuff.) It's made in Italy, and it's supposed to be durable and impervious and great for countertops. It may be all that - but yesterday I showed my sample to my contractor's fabricator (more on that in a minute), and he said "I know this stuff, it's shit to work with".
The fabricator's shop is right behind my contractor's office (at the industrial end of Park Slope, Brooklyn). He's a real old Italian marble guy, third or fourth generation. His shop is a skylit barn with huge ancient equipment. He was working on an ornate tombstone, the most incredible room-high slabs and ornate cornices of pink and white onyx for someone's bathroom, and an inlaid compass medallion bigger than my entire kitchen. Scraps of slabs were arrayed in racks. Curious, I dusted off the corner of one and - what's this? A marble? No, a granite. A white granite with regular, feathery greenish and brownish veining. I have no idea what it's called or where it's from. All I know is that it's left over from one of the prettiest kitchens I saw in my contractor's book of snapshots, that it's a scrap just big enough for my little kitchen, and that it's mine. I tried to take a picture but it didn't really come out:
The maple will go beautifully (we walked the stain samples over to it and looked at them in sunlight to pick), the celery-colored backsplash that I see when I close my eyes and think of my kitchen will be perfect ...
So after all that fuss and research and obsession, I found exactly what I wanted (and didn't know I did) in a couple of hours yesterday morning.
More later on tile etc.
