Six Tips for a Knockout Kitchen from Designer Chris Berry

Chris Berry of brooksBerry Kitchens and Baths has been designing kitchens for more than two decades. A frequent award winner, she recently couped the gold at the National Kitchen and Bath Assn. annual convention for the best kitchen in the country. Over the years, Ms. Berry has learned some basic truisms about what makes what many consider the most important room in the house.

1. “You can’t do a great kitchen without a great space,” Ms. Berry says. “It either has to have some architectural interest, something interesting with the ceiling, wonderful exposures with the windows, unusual door configurations. It has to have something that is different, that you don’t normally see.” Ms. Berry recalls one kitchen in a small split-level house where they swamped the doors and the windows. “Suddenly, everything fell into place. You had fabulous light into the kitchen that you didn’t have, it fixed the dining room where it gave her a place for a sideboard. Looking at the structure is key.”

2. Function. “Things have to be located in logical relationships to each other,” Ms. Berry says. Not a fan of the traditional kitchen triangle, she prefers designing her home kitchen like those found in restaurants. “Food flows into the kitchen,” she explains. “Cold goes one direction, dry/pantry goes another and it is really helpful if those are close to each other. You need a landing space for those grocery bags near where that pantry.” And she breaks it down by meals: “For breakfast, I want the bread near where the toaster is; the coffee pot needs to be near the water; the bowls need to be close by; and the silverware.” She also warns against planning a kitchen around that annual big party. “That’s the wrong thing to do because then they end up with a kitchen that is stupidly large for the other 364 days of the year. You don’t design for the exception. You design for the norm.”

3. Materials. “I think everyone assumes I am going to put in granite in the kitchen, hardwood floors and tile on the wall,” Ms. Berry says. “God forbid. Push for something that is a little bit unusual. Those make nice kitchens but do they make memorable kitchens? No.” She recommends using unusual stones, like Schist, a sedimentary stone, and stones that age gracefully. “I think people want kitchens that look new forever. The only kitchens that are going to look forever new are the boring ones with the man-made porcelain. So what’s wrong with a little bit of character?”

4. “The budget has to work in the right way,” Ms. Berry continues. “A lot of people will splurge and put in granite countertops but they put them on really cheap cabinets and in five years, the cabinet door slides are all broken and the finish is coming off the cabinets.” Instead, she says the proper way to plan is from the bottom up. “Put in a fabulous floor, because that is the base layer. Put in fabulous cabinets because that holds everything else up. If you have to cut someplace, cut on the countertop. That is the easiest thing to change out in a kitchen.”

5. “Don’t be afraid to be trendy.” Ms. Berry recalls when she first moved to St. Louis from the east coast and she was advising a client on the latest in kitchens. “The woman looked at me in terror and said, ‘Oh, no, sweetie, you don’t understand. To be a trendsetter in St. Louis is a negative.’” But when clients ask for longevity, they need to do something that “is fresh and unique,” Ms. Berry says. “One of my professors in college said, ‘As designers, we need to not be order takers. We need to be pushing our clients to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. That is the value of the designer.’ And when you do that, you are the one others want to immolate.”

6. Ms. Berry trekked to Kohler, Wisconsin to hear the Irish designer, Clodagh. Her approach to design is to ask the client to recall a place where they were the happiest and then describe it in detail, down to the sounds and smells of the space and then tell her where that was. “She uses that as a springboard for working for clients.” One of Clodagh’s clients was the actor, Robert Redford. She used the technique on him and he recalled lying on his back in a grass field, blue sky overhead. “On his patio in this New York apartment, she planted these huge planters full of rush grasses. And that became the theme of the whole design.” Ms. Berry has done that with clients as well. Sometimes they concentrate on a favorite piece of art. And one had a favorite barstool. “That’s the most fun thing to do because you are designing it for them. You’re not copying anyone else from a magazine but you are digging deep into what makes that person them.”