Chicago Kitchen Incorporates the Latest Design Trends

With years of experience building homes on narrow urban infill lots in Chicago’s toniest neighborhoods, Barnett Homes prides itself on coming up with creative ways to stretch a floor plan to make the interior feel wider. For this $1.9 million spec home in the city’s Lakeview neighborhood, the firm didn’t let the constraints of a 25-foot-wide lot derail its vision for a spacious and bright kitchen. Architects from local firm Stoneberg + Gross worked around the problem by placing the kitchen in the middle of the first floor, where it is open to the light-filled living space and easily accessible to the dining room via a butler’s pantry pass-through.

The creative layout left plenty of ancillary space for a roomy island, kitchen table eating area, and a large walk-in pantry and powder room tucked behind the double refrigerator. “If you compared the usability and space of this house to a wider house, the way the pantry and kitchen expands beyond where the appliances are makes it seem so much larger,” says Barnett president Ken Fixler.

Ten-foot-tall ceilings add to the feeling of expansiveness and make way for extra storage in the upper cabinets. Other standouts in the space include rich-looking white quartz countertop with a thickened, mitered edge and gunmetal gray-stained red oak floors.

Barnett, which completed about 70 homes last year, takes pains to set itself apart from other new and resale homes in the hot Chicago move-up market. One of the newest ways that the firm is staying on-trend is with the use of a variety of metal fixtures placed side by side throughout its homes. In this project, this means brass light fixtures from Arteriors, stainless steel appliances, chrome and brushed nickel plumbing fixtures from Kohler and Blanco, and Emtek polished nickel cabinet pulls.

“We incorporated all these metals in order to stand out a little bit from the competition,” Fixler says. “In a neighborhood with transitional homes this helps us lean a bit toward contemporary and creates more warmth for the home.”

It’s not a huge design risk, Fixler points out, because if a buyer doesn’t like one of the metal fixture selections “it takes 10 minutes to switch it out. It’s sort of like jewelry,” he says. “It adds a sparkle and you can put it on and take it off.”