I suppose my approach to hard furnishings is opposite to most people’s. The first question I always ask is, “Can we make this instead of buying it?” A custom-designed ‘anything’ lets you fill a brief more completely. In this apartment, the way the flow needed to work with a segmenting of two different but associated living zones meant connecting dining room with kitchen while leaving enough space to access the balcony from either side. The solution was to join the table with the island, but sitting them side by side would have looked rather . . . unintentional. We had started to develop an ‘overlapping’ theme throughout the apartment so we carried it through in the specs for the custom dining table.
If designing requires a 3D model, then a custom build calls for something more — precise, dimensioned construction drawings. But here’s the major caveat. Getting the right person to do the job can NEVER be overstated. We struck gold. Enter Darren from Pittsburgh.
A wall of tools like this one and I knew we were in good hands. We selected the wood, the joints, the finishing, and then simply got out of his way.
In the end, it was every (little) thing we asked for, a “three-legged, restaurant quality, bar height table standing perfectly level while leaning on an upsized kitchen island, large enough to seat 8 people comfortably”. Simples.
The kitchen wall was removed and the kitchen was a gut renovation.
