Even the best-laid plans can sometimes require a pivot. That’s what award-winning designer Jean Stoffer and her daughter, Grace Start—who leads the design team at Jean Stoffer Design and appears with Jean on the Magnolia Network show The Established Home—discovered when they were revamping a modern cabin in the woods a few miles from Lake Michigan.
Five years earlier, Jean had remodeled the kitchen in the owners’ Chicago home. This one, a modern vacation home in far southwest Michigan designed by a Chicago architect in the 1990s, also needed a full kitchen remodel, and the time had finally come to tackle it.
There were floating uppers that hung from the 7-foot, 10-inch ceiling over the island, blocking the kitchen off from the living room and obstructing the sightline. The island was so long, it made it hard to open the door to the outside. A giant banquette off the kitchen that Jean estimates could accommodate 10 people was difficult to get in and out of. And the storage space was so limited, Grace dubbed it a “micropantry.”
Other parts of the home needed a refresh too. “The house had the original glossy teal blue tile in the 12-foot-wide hallway that connects the main spaces to the bedrooms and in the former inglenook room,” says Grace. The current homeowners had taken the fireplace out of that inglenook years ago, and they had no idea what to do with it. Additionally, the damp, weather-worn screened-in porch was a much-used room that offered views of the woods in every direction. But it had a concrete floor that was not finish-grade—at least not anymore—and a leaking ceiling that looked like it had something growing on it.
To open up the kitchen and make it more functional, Jean and Grace removed the floating cabinets, shortened the island by about three feet, and turned the banquette into a storage-packed scullery-slash-pantry by adding pocket doors. They made up for the missing seating with a 10-person locally crafted solid oak dining table that Jean designed, centering the table on the double window in the living room and lighting it with long-armed sconces.
They turned the inglenook into a home office by raising the sunken floor, turning the two half walls into full walls with windows and double doors, and building a floating desk. And they swapped out the screens surrounding the porch for windows, turning it into a three-season room that was much more protected from the elements. To connect it to the kitchen, they replaced the plate-glass window with one that slides open over the sink, making the space more interactive and conversational.
Which left the tile. “Our original design intention was to go with the Ann Sacks Barisano porcelain field tile, which is a beautiful product, in a neutral, limestone-looking grayish finish in that connecting space, the office, and the porch,” says Jean. “But then the homeowner saw the same tile in a deep reddish-brown terracotta color as we were looking through an Ann Sacks brochure, and she loved it. I was wowed.”
So Jean and Grace embraced the new direction, ordering samples of the Barisono tile in the Mattone color that the client had chosen. In the three-season porch, they installed Barsiano 2-by-11 rectangles in a herringbone pattern. They repeated the pattern in a central rectangle of the office, framing it with a stacked border to essentially create a herringbone “rug.” In the dramatic hallway, which has French doors on either side and a peaked roof, they opted for the same tile but in a hexagon, which Jean says makes a design statement that really pops.
“Our intention was to use a different colorway from this exact collection, but after this one was installed, we all loved it,” says Jean. “There’s quite a bit of variation, so it’s interesting. And it looks like real terracotta, but because it’s porcelain, it’s indestructible. We went with the original intent of the architect, who used the same tile in various places throughout the house, but we mixed up the shapes and patterns.”
September 22nd, 2024
