Green Kitchens: Remodeling a Victorian Kitchen in San Francisco

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Adjacent to the kitchen is the original laundry porch, now a sunny enclosed seating area. Photo By Linda Svendsen

The following is an excerpt from "Good Green Kitchens" by Jennifer Roberts (Gibbs Smith, 2006). The excerpt is from Chapter 5: Energy, Water and Cleaning Up. 

Although I’d spent less than an hour in Leslie Spring’s company, as soon as I bit into the fresh tomato galette she served up for lunch, I wanted to ask her to be my friend for life. Spring grew up in San Francisco in the Queen Anne–style Victorian where she and her husband, architect Geoffrey Gainer, now live. Room by room, they are gradually renovating the three-story house, which was originally built in 1894. Given their zest for cooking, it’s no surprise that the kitchen was a top priority.

The interior spaces had good bones, including original Victorian woodwork, large double-hung windows, and eleven-foot ceilings, but the kitchen was outdated and walled off from the dining room, inhibiting casual entertaining. The couple dreamed of having enough storage to accommodate their large collection of antique and modern cookware, as well as enough counter space to hold the profusion of organic produce they haul home from the city’s farmers’ markets on weekends.

Gainer removed interior walls between the old kitchen, dining room, and pantry to create an airy 450-square-foot space that’s a dream in which to cook and entertain. Instead of demolishing the walls and hauling the splintered framing lumber to the landfill, which happens all too frequently in these tear-down-happy times, Gainer had the walls deconstructed.

The wall studs—old-growth Douglas fir harvested more than a century ago—were re-milled and joined to create a dramatic system of open shelves suspended from the ceiling. In keeping with the spirit of deconstruction, the shelving units, some of which have frameless glass doors, can be fully disassembled, the wood and hardware reused, and the metal and glass recycled.