Walnut, clay
& Calacatta.
A private kitchen for a four-bedroom apartment in Al Barari — clay-painted base units, fluted walnut joinery, a single book-matched slab of Italian Calacatta. Six of our seven divisions on one timeline.
The brief
Concept · materials · constraints
The clients — a young family moving into a higher-floor apartment with a north-east view across the Al Barari botanical gardens — came to us with a single image and one constraint: nothing white. They wanted warmth, weight, a kitchen that read more like a room and less like a fitted unit. They had two children under five.
We took it as licence to abandon the conventional perimeter-and-island plan. Instead, two ribbons: a tall wall of fluted American black walnut housing the appliances and the larder; a low U of clay-painted base cabinets capped by a single 4.2-metre slab of book-matched Calacatta Vagli. The marble continues five-and-a-half metres up the back wall as one piece — an excuse for our stone division to put the new water-jet through its paces.
The hood is bespoke: a 90-degree painted carbon-steel canopy made in our metal shop, hand-finished to match the clay below. The hardware — satin nickel D-pulls turned in the same shop — is the only thing in the room you can buy off a shelf, and even then only because the client insisted.
Six surfaces, one conversation.
Every surface is sampled twice — once on a 200×200 chip, once on a 1:1 prototype panel cut in the factory before the client signs off. Below, the full library for this project.
Fluted 18mm pitch · matte oil
Sprayed · low-sheen 5%
Honed · waterjet edge
In-house metal shop
Smoked & soaped finish
Hand-finished, clay-matched
Six of our seven divisions
worked this room.
Each section is named, briefed and budgeted separately by its own foreman. They share one shared programme and one shared snag list — the only way a 14-week kitchen happens.
A week-by-week.
Our project managers run a single live programme shared with the client — here, condensed to seven beats.
The room, in pieces.
“We went to the factory four times. We watched our kitchen be made. By the time it arrived, it already felt ours.”
— H. & A., Al Barari · September 2024