One Room Challenge WEEK 1 : Visions for a Bold Boho Kitchen

Hayyyy ORC – WE’RE HERE!

The crew here at Kate Pearce Vintage is diving in head first to the Spring 2019 One Room Challenge and we couldn’t be more excited. This is our very first ORC and we’re not just dipping our toes in this round, we’re going BIG. We’re gutting our 1980s kitchen to the studs and building our dream boho kitchen – and for those of you who aren’t new around here you know that will mean lots of color, texture and, you guessed it, VINTAGE vibes. Because we all know vintage is the name of our game.

As you may have guessed, taking a kitchen down to its studs and rebuilding from scratch is a task that takes more than five weekends (we’re a husband + wife duo who work Monday-Friday), so we’ve started a bit early and are crossing our fingers to be done by reveal day. We’ve teamed up with some fabulous sponsors for our project and are just itching to show off their beautiful products – Riad Tile, Boho Luxe Home, Build.com, Hallman Industries and Wallternatives are all along for the ride.

SO – what’s this kitchen going to look like? We’ve pinned more than 75 kitchens on Pinterest and another 100+ are saved in our I-Phone “Kitchen Inspo” folder. More than four months have been spent agonizing over where to begin, HOW to begin, and where we want to end. We’ve sucked inspiration from so many beautiful Instagram squares, including these two from Jean Stoffer Design (Left) and Beginning in the Middle (Right).

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And the more images we saved, the more we noticed themes beginning to emerge: BLUE, matte black and brass accents, statement stoves and bold, graphic patterns. We also just fell HARD for calcutta marble. But out of all of those things, the piece that caught our eye the most in kitchen after kitchen….. after kitchen.. was that statement stove. So, we ordered a 48″ cobalt blue Hallman range and used that as our starting off point for the rest of the kitchen.

We’re loving the current trend of mixing metals, and this Hallman range hit all the marks for us: that bold blue color, with brass and stainless steel working together to prove that two metals are just so much better than one.

The biggest challenge for me, as a designer, is to balance bold with a cohesive composition. I love taking a viewer’s eye to different elements of interest around a room, but the room still needs to work together. I like to think of it as the Kardashian effect: each player steals our eye for a moment, but the overall picture is even stronger than any one element on its own. It’s for this reason we decided to go with your ubiquitous white shaker cabinet. With bold roman shades, graphic black and white tile, and a statement stove, the cabinets just HAVE to blend and not shout, otherwise we’d almost certainly have more than a few offended eyeballs on our hands.

Now that you have an idea of where we are GOING with the kitchen, I think you’d better be clued in to where we began.

The photo above is how the kitchen looked on move-in day in June of 2017. We knew we’d be gutting the kitchen in short order, so we didn’t bother to do much, but I did get some 50 cent hardware off Amazon and I painted the kitchen cabinets a deep blue. Overall, though, this is very much what the space has looked like.

Just to the right of the kitchen there was a powder room that we demolished during week 1 of construction to make more space for the kitchen. We are also removing the wall between our kitchen and dining room to make the space feel more open, and replacing windows and doorways is also in the plan.

This has been an enormous undertaking, but we’re really just so excited to see the final outcome.

We hope you are, too.