Beyond Veggies...Greening Your Kitchen

With a little creativity and some inspiration it is easy to create a green kitchen design on any budget. When your budget is tight, you may want to focus on reuse to save some green. However, if you have some money to work with you can create custom designs using recycled materials and stay green.

Hydroponics Cabinetry

Have you ever considered setting up a hydroponic system to grow your own food? At first glance this may seem a little over the top, but just look at what people are doing with indoor herb gardens and vertical window farms. Combine these design elements with some custom cabinetry and your garden can easily move right into your kitchen and produce food year round. Not to mention the novelty and beauty of custom hydroponics cabinetry. Although, realistically, most people will likely stick with a small herb garden, you could let your imagination run with this idea and include grow lights where needed. 

Chest Freezer Butcher Block

An upright freezer is one of the least efficient appliances in your home. Swapping it out for a chest freezer is the best green alternative, but you need a place to put it in your kitchen. This is where we bring in a butcher block. By installing a butcher block on the top of a chest freezer you now have counter space which can easily fit into your existing cabinets and counters. Alternatively, you can turn your chest freezer butcher block into a kitchen island.

Glass Door Refrigerator

Once you've removed the freezer from your refrigerator it is much easier to consider a glass door refrigerator. These tend not to have freezers built into them and they can be much more energy efficient. Mostly, this is because you can look inside the refrigerator to find what you want before opening the door. Since the door spends less time open with people staring into the refrigerator, less energy is wasted cooling your kitchen.

Green Cabinetry

When you are considering new cabinetry for your kitchen there are myriad green options available. Reclaimed lumber, strawboard, or wheatboard are just a few, and bamboo provides a beautiful, durable and non-toxic choice.  However, it is important to keep thinking green as you consider cabinetry coverings and doors. Purchasing zero VOC paint can reduce the chemicals leaching into the air in your home.  Each of these design elements can help make your cabinets just a little greener.

Recycled Counter Tops

While you're considering new green cabinetry, you should also look at green counter tops. Some of the most common options include recycled glass, concrete, aluminum, and paper. These are both beautiful and environmentally friendly. Also, the same bamboo which is used to make cutting boards can be used to create custom counter tops. Although bamboo counter tops are not technically recycled, this stuff grows so fast it might as well be. Bamboo is a highly sustainable and rapidly renewable resource which brings great form and function to any kitchen design.

Quantifying Taste...

A person's design aesthetic or "taste" is closely tied to emotion and translating those feelings into words becomes challenging when there are so many unfettered artful details bouncing around the imagination.  Add in memories and past experiences in spaces that one might want to re-create and communication really becomes murky. The first task in the process of creating or renovating a space often occurs well before the actual design work has begun; and that is simply defining what the finished space should look and feel like and then successfully communicating the concept to the designer.  When approaching any project, it is critical that everyone involved—clients, designers, and craftspeople—are working off the same vision and toward the same goal.   And that is why, of all the tools at our disposal today, one of the most critical is an item that you cannot buy at any hardware store.  In fact, you cannot buy it at all; it is free, on-line, and available to everyone...

Houzz.com is a social media website designed specifically around interior design that offers a virtually endless reservoir of home-improvement and design inspirations.   One of Houzz.com’s benefits is that it helps close the conceptual gap between creative collaborators.  No matter what space you're creating or renovating, Houzz.com presents a wide range of styles, many with subtle shades of differences.  Houzz.com provides endless inspiration and the virtual cork board on which to save, compare, live with, and share your ideas.  It would not be an exaggeration to describe Houzz.com as the Pinterest for interior design—only with Houzz.com’s single-subject purpose, you won’t be distracted by myriad other pretty pictures, click on a diverting link, and wind up admiring shoes for twenty minutes.  With tools like Houzz.com you can take your time honing in on the exact look that serves all your needs, as well as giving your designer a crystal clear concept of what you envision.  This makes budgeting much easier, and virtually guarantees that what you envision is what you will get. 

Join me on Houzz.com

There is a lot at stake in a remodeling job, financially as well as emotionally.  That is why Jason Landau  and his team at Amazing Spaces L.L.C. accentuates the value of collaboration with their clients, and one reason their clients love working with them.   Jason enthusiastically recommends checking out Houzz.com early in the design and interior space planning process.  Follow Jason's profile on Houzz.com to see firsthand his dazzling aesthetic and design contributions; you will quickly understand how easy and rewarding collaboration can be.  For more information visit the Amazing Spaces website at www.amazingspacesllc.com or phone Jason at 914-239-3725.