Contemporary Custom Kitchen · Caledon, Ontario
Walnut is a contemporary kitchen built around contrast. Matte-black perimeter cabinetry creates a quiet backdrop for a hand-reeded walnut island, where the warmth and movement of the wood become the focal point of the room.
The simplicity is deliberate. Behind it is some of the more technically demanding cabinetry we’ve produced, including two curved cabinet doors, continuous walnut grain matching across adjacent drawer fronts, integrated recessed lighting and custom interior inserts.
Rather than simplifying the design to make it easier to manufacture, the cabinetry was engineered around the original idea.
The island’s form isn’t created with straight doors arranged around a radius. Two custom curved doors follow the geometry of the island itself, allowing the cabinetry to maintain a continuous form through the corners.
The walnut was hand-reeded to follow that curved surface, while the grain across adjacent drawer fronts was carefully matched so the material reads continuously rather than as a collection of individual pieces.
It’s a detail that’s easy to appreciate visually. Making it work as functioning cabinetry is the harder part.
The coffee bar incorporates a smart pocket-door system that was new to the Canadian market when AWDS introduced it. According to the manufacturer, this was the first installation in Canada and only the third in North America.
When open, the doors retract out of the working area, leaving the coffee bar completely accessible. When closed, it returns to the clean cabinetry composition of the surrounding kitchen.
Custom inserts and integrated recessed lighting complete the interior, allowing the coffee bar to function differently from the cabinetry around it without looking like a separate piece.
One of Walnut’s more unusual details is almost invisible from the outside.
Instead of accepting the limitations of a conventional blind corner, AWDS designed a full-height pantry cabinet around four individual LeMans storage units.
LeMans hardware is typically associated with a two-shelf blind-corner base cabinet. Stacking four units within a tall cabinet allowed us to make far more of the otherwise difficult-to-access vertical space while maintaining the uninterrupted exterior of the kitchen.
It is the kind of solution that defines the project: the complicated work happens behind a deliberately simple exterior.
Walnut was designed to look effortless. It wasn’t built that way.
From curved doors and hand-reeded walnut to grain matching, custom storage and technology being introduced to the Canadian market for the first time, the cabinetry was developed around the design rather than limiting the design to what was easiest to manufacture.
