White kitchens are, truly, not for everyone. These clients, settling in Bloomington with a newborn and collections of quilts, Fiestaware and jam band tour posters, were drawn to how bright and clean a white kitchen can be, but reluctant to lose color and interest. At SYH, we agreed! It would have felt like too sudden a drain of intensity to go from so much vibrancy to a complete white out. At the same time, all that vibrancy needed a backdrop that didn't compete. Enter the bright green island! And yellow sconces! And red bird runner! And upstairs, in a complete makeover of an awkward ensuite, the turquoise ceiling and door! (You really can't speak of these things without exclamation marks, we find.) True to its 1960s era colonial bones, the kitchen was formerly a tight U of wood stained cabinetry, adjacent to but cut off from an eating nook (where, if it's like most households, previous occupants likely ate most if not all of their meals, leaving the nearby dining room awfully lonely and unused). The eating nook's picture window became a door to a new deck, and one side of the U went away, leaving room for one of the most functional types of kitchen layouts we know of: an L with big windows to the back yard and a nice big island. 

Photography by Gina Rogers and Michiko Owaki.