Ahhh, Naturel
We’re all bent over, looking up under Leah Hair’s kitchen island. “Just look at this,” she says, patting the chocolatey giant hunk of an old elm tree, reclaimed for a new life from Urban Hardwoods. And there, sure enough, cut into the underside of this massive slab of wood are plumbing lines and electrical outlets.
It’s details like this that make Hair’s new contemporary kitchen in her traditional Magnolia home what it is: a warm, inviting place to cook in, hang out or cozy up.
“I thought, whether this turns out great or not depends on the details,” she says. She asked architect Nils Finne, ” ‘Are you a detail person?’ ”
He is.
“My son studied with a master Japanese potter, and Nils picked up on those pieces with the contrast of dark and light woods, and especially with the tatami mats over the cabinets,” Hair says, gazing across the room over a cup of tea, perfectly at home in her organic kitchen.
Finne took out a wall to create one long room that reaches from the front garden-view of the house to the back Elliott Bay side. Where the long elm island ends, the elm dining table picks up, carrying the eye the length of the 34-foot-long room. Both tables have custom blued-steel bases with a laser-cut bronze overlay. The island features a live-edge profile of the tree it was.
Finne also designed the kitchen stools, which have a blued-steel base and a cattail-rush seat woven by artist Del Webber. The lighting consists of 15 small candle-like fixtures in custom steel brackets. Finne’s cabinets are bleached Alaskan yellow cedar frames with bamboo panels, a light contrast to the dark Belgian Blue limestone counters accented with a stone mosaic backsplash that has a bamboo-like pattern. Next to the backsplash is a long horizontal window with a bear-grass resin panel.
This tree is an islandMan and nature meet in the middle of Leah Hair’s kitchen. The big slabs of umber-stained elm seem simple enough for a kitchen island. But what lies beneath is a work of design mastery.
“From the beginning we talked about the dining table and island as being pieces of furniture rather than cabinetry,” says architect Nils Finne of FINNE Architects.
“In the island you have the disposal, with a stainless shroud around it so you don’t see it. There’s a 4-foot-long trough sink. The plumbing pipes had to come up in precisely the right place. These things are not buried inside some cabinet you’re not going to see.
“The final thing you don’t see is the electrical. Where do you plug things in in this beautiful table? We routed out the underside of the slab and laid in the wiring and outlets. The wiring had to sneak its way up adjacent to the plumbing so you don’t notice it’s coming up out of the floor.”
Finne credits contractor Joe Villano from Schultz Miller and Urban Hardwoods for making the island the center of Hair’s kitchen paradise.
All these Asian details flow quietly into Hair’s living room, which holds pieces collected from travels in West Africa during the Peace Corps. This kitchen transformation has not gone unnoticed. Finne’s work recently was recognized by the Seattle Design Center as the winning kitchen in the 2007 Northwest Design Awards.
“It is fine materials honestly presented,” Hair says, summing it up.
It wasn’t supposed to be all this.
“This project started because I had a dying stove, a dying refrigerator and a dead disposal; and I wanted a gas stove,” Hair says. “This is a family house. I didn’t want a designer kitchen.”
To run a gas line the stove had to be relocated to an outside wall and . . . you know, six months later a whole new room is born.
“I didn’t want a voluminous kitchen. The kids have fledged, but I have friends coming in. And when the kids come home we all enjoy cooking together. We all end up in the kitchen.”
When did all this transformation into tranquility start at Hair’s secluded cottage just up from the boulevard that weaves around Magnolia?
She doesn’t even have to think about it: “May 9, 2005. That was destruction day. The reason I remember it is because I thought, ‘What the hell was I thinking? I must be completely mad.’ ”
No. It just feels that way.
“I moved to the basement and cooked on a hot plate in the laundry room,” she says. On Thanksgiving Day 2005 Hair’s kitchen was finished. The room made its debut at the holiday feast.
And now?
“It’s such a serene place, and everybody notices that. They walk in and go. ‘Ahhh.’ ”
It’s raining. Another cup of tea sounds good.
Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.