Kitchens & Baths
Tricks of the Trade
A private chef and culinary instructor shares tips on making a kitchen cook-friendly with stylish and practical suggestions about layout, organization and more

In great restaurants, the cooks move like dancers, gracefully grabbing pans and ingredients.




Opening drawers slows down a busy cook. Tight spaces on either side of the stove led to these open slots from which I can quickly and easily access cutting boards, cookie sheets and oversized trays.


Busy cooks need salt and pepper within arm’s reach. Putting the salt in wide-mouthed bowls makes it easy to grab a pinch and add it right to the pot.


 Plates and silverware are easy to access above the sink. Their location just one step from the dishwasher also eases putting away dishes.


Original ideas are like original recipes … one in a million. I credit Culinary Communion for their inventive spice magnet idea. They had theirs mounted under a very tall cabinet. I took their idea, inverted it and made mine a spice wall, making sure it was away from light and heat, which are no-nos for spices.

Working as a private chef, I am often asked by my clients how my own kitchen is set up—where do I keep my pots and pans, where is the stove in relation to the sink and refrigerator, where do I store much-used utensils?  Until recently, I could only paint a picture in the air of how I would lay out my perfect kitchen. Last year, soon after purchasing my Capitol Hill condo, I finally got the chance to realize the kitchen of my dreams.

If you love cooking as much as I do—if you are passionate about food and have just the smallest, wee bit of an addiction to home-design television programs—then you know the excitement I felt standing at the completely gutted blank slate of a kitchen before me. I had been waiting my whole life to design a chef-friendly, efficient, beautiful workshop in which to do what I love best.

Mind you, my childlike, wide-open-with-wonder optimism came early in the process. Many months lay ahead of me—months filled with contractor impasses, design flaws and moments of absolute befuddlement staring at a two-dimensional Swedish blob of a how-to drawing. My first gas stove arrived with a huge dent on the bottom, apparently from having been chucked off a pallet from a great height; it was an extra-special moment when I realized that the oven damage was discovered one day after the return policy had lapsed. I experienced other moments like this that, suffice it to say, were best described in language inappropriate for this article.

I had several goals when I set out to rebuild the kitchen. Most importantly, it needed to be easy to use. Having worked for many years in restaurant kitchens, I knew I wanted a semblance of a restaurant line, designed for efficiency: stove, sink, workplace with large cutting board, and then refrigerator, laid out so that most of the work of the kitchen can be done with as few steps as possible. In great restaurants, the cooks move like dancers, gracefully grabbing pans from open shelving and ingredients from small, refrigerated reach-ins. If you see cooks running around, the kitchen is either going down or it was poorly designed.

My second goal was to create a beautiful work space that respects the bones of the 1916 building in which I live, while at the same time updating the fixtures and adding a contemporary feel. I exposed the original brick wall (and found a recipe for banana pie filling typed onto a little index card, likely from the 1940s) and left the old pipes exposed to contrast with the sleek surfaces of my new stainless-steel appliances.

Last, but not least, I wanted a kitchen that incorporated sustainable or green design. I consulted with Sandy Campbell, who runs One Earth One Design, a Greenwood lifestyle store and interior design firm that offers eco-friendly home furnishing products, services and materials. Campbell helped me pick out cork flooring (forgiving on tired feet), recycled glass tile for my backsplash (simply gorgeous) and manufactured stone counter tops (made from leftover bits of stone).

Much as with labor—as some mothers have told me—the pain slowly fades from memory once you behold your new child. While my baby requires less care than a human one, I gaze upon it daily with what I imagine is the same pride and adoration. The manual labor, the return lines at big-box stores, that singular moment when I realized we had mismeasured the distance between the stove handle and the drawer that slammed into it—all forgotten.

Well, almost.

More Trade Secrets

•    Make sure lighting is directly over your work space so you don’t create shadows with your body. More lighting is better than less. I added five can lights, three hanging lights and two smaller spotlights.

•    As with lighting, the more outlets the better. I ran outlets in a strip underneath one of the cabinets, as well as the more traditional wall outlets.

•    This may seem obvious, but refrigerator and freezer doors should open away from the work space, not into it. On that note, I prefer refrigerators with single large doors as opposed to side-by-side models.

•    An extra-deep double sink is a thing of beauty that also makes it easy to clean produce and fill big pots. A gooseneck faucet with a removable sprayer is also handy. Buy a high-quality, middle- to top-of-the-line faucet, as it is one of the things you will use numerous times every day.