Kitchen islands are a huge asset in any kitchen that can accommodate them. Offering ample workspace and extra room for cabinets and appliances, the island often becomes the heart of a kitchen, especially one in which the residents entertain. They say that a party always finds its way to the kitchen: once there it orbits the island.
Most of the things we build here at Cannon Hill are large dining tables, meant to accommodate large gatherings of family and friends around a showstopping piece of furniture. They’re beautiful, often mesmerizing, and they’re worthy, impressive anchors to dining rooms around New England. But custom furniture is a capacious category, and there are many more ways that Cannon Hill can bring the beauty of solid hardwoods into your home than just large dining tables.
Our clients, for whom we’d previously built the walnut coffee table in these pictures, approached us with a concept that was pretty much new to Cannon Hill: a totally removable kitchen island extension that could serve was both a cutting board and, when pulled out from the island, seating for two. It’s always fun to work out the particular needs of an unfamiliar sort of project, even one that appears at surface level as simple as this one. After all, it’s just two pieces of wood attached at a right angle; how much could there be to that?
This project was a fun departure and an opportunity to build for a type of space that we don’t often see. Our client was finishing out his basement with a full bar and a total redesign set to give the House of Blues a run for its money. Once we had some inspiration images in hand, we set about planning the build and ensuring that our finished product would look at home in the tricked-out new basement.
This is a Live-Edge Maple Slab that we cut to size and installed to be the countertop for a great client in Hyde Park, Boston. The grain has incredible figure that pops when oiled. We took great care with this slab to tie it and fill all the crack with a durable pour epoxy. Milled maple can be very uniform and light but live edge big leaf and burly maple slabs are wild!
Ten foot live edge slab countertop in Winchester. We found the perfect slab for this project through Berkshire Products large inventory of elm slabs. This elm slab was the perfect width to leave it live on both sides. It had one tear out, the only imperfection in the entire thing, that lined up right where we would be doing a cutout for a sink. Basically, it was fated to end up in this kitchen. Elm is a really nice, lower cost option to walnut, and it blends really well in most spaces. Elm slabs tend to have a very consistent and clean grain, and a nice color palette.
Ideally you have the length of material to use single lengths of board whenever you're doing a waterfall so that the grain patter can continue over the edge. It's a subtle thing, but when you don't do it, there is something subconsciously off about the piece. This reclaimed oak bart top was a careful build. We went out first to measure and template.
This reclaimed oak table is attached directly to the kitchen island in this newly renovated Charlestown condominium. The idea behind the design is that the table can remain shorter, so that it doesn't encroach upon the doorway entry to the condo, but that there is more room for seating. The table is attached to a ledger that sits invisible between the skirts and is fastened sturdily to the island.
This project came to us from an awesome client who also happens to be an interior design professional remodeling her own kitchen and living room. Here at Cannon Hill Woodworking, some of us come from a professional remodeling background, but remodel is not what we do as a group because we are very much set up as a workshop operation. We make furniture for the most part. That being said, we do build accent pieces and install them. We've done many bar tops and live edge shelves and walnut kitchen island tops for example.
Th design for this reclaimed oak kitchen island base began as a walnut island with an I/X trestle base. We did a computer spec drawing for the clients when they first reached out because they wanted to achieve three specific design and function points: the I/X trestle, the bench had to tuck all the way in (so the bench height had to line up with the thinnest point on the trestle base, and they wanted an extension for stool seats on the ends. All of these points were achievable, but it required some careful planning on our part.