Description

KITCHEN CENTRIC puts a new spin on the kitchen design book, offering readers an art book, a fantasy book, and a bit of a field guide. Internationally known kitchen designer Mick De Giulio takes readers on a guided tour through eighteen of his favorite kitchen projects from around the country — in urban lofts and high-rise condos, suburban homes, manor houses, mountain retreats, and even an early twentieth-century barn. The kitchens are decidedly highend, but De Giulio’s lessons in dreaming and in mixing materials, colors, finishes, and design vocabularies inspire all homeowners.

Spectacular photographs (shot specifically for the book by Hedrich Blessing Photographers) and De Giulio’s storytelling reveal these glorious kitchens, which roll one after the other like short films. They include a resolutely masculine kitchen (mixing stainless steel, nickel silver, high-gloss dark wenge wood, and light marble) in a French neoclassical-style house in downtown Chicago; a lighter-than-air kitchen that seems to melt into the background of an art-filled Miami Beach condo; an open kitchen that refuses to be all traditional in a Monticello-esque house on Long Island; and an artful kitchen for an eccentric French Normandy house in northern California. De Giulio explains the challenges he faced in each of these kitchens, his thinking, his choices, his process, and, ultimately, his belief that kitchens are becoming more central to American homes and home life than ever before. Perennial questions about kitchen design (Should cabinets go to the ceiling? How many materials can you mix into one kitchen? Is stainless steel dated?) are likewise answered.

So is the question “What exactly is that?” Each of the featured kitchens is decoded at the back of the book, with materials and appliances identified, leaving no reason why KITCHEN CENTRIC cannot invoke kitchen dreams and transform them into reality.