Renovating the Food 52 kitchen

There are a lot of kitchen renovating articles, but they tend to follow rote patterns: what to do if the sky’s the limit, what to do with an absurdly low amount of money, what to do with a miniscule amount of space. In short, many have good ideas, but often are not realistic or practical. Amanda Hesser’s recent article about her (and Food 52‘s) kitchen renovation, though, caught our eye for several reasons:

• First, her motivation was unusual – 10 years ago she had moved into a space with a new, expensively redecorated kitchen, so she couldn’t justify a rehab. As she writes, “she generally liked its bones” but a number of the choices the decorators had made annoyed her. Eventually the decor irritated her so much she just couldn’t abide it anymore. 
• Second, this is truly a working kitchen – as she says, “Merrill and I tested 1,400 recipes in it for one of my books, and Food52 has used the kitchen for weekly photo shoots since we launched the site.” This despite the fact that the brown kitchen color made food photography very challenging.
• Third, there were no major construction requirements, which led to an ability to work within a reasonably tight budget of $15,000 – enough to make some significant changes but not one that would put an average home owner in substantial debt.

This article clearly shows the changes she made, along with some clever ideas on how to redeem something (marble, back drops) you simply can’t live with but can’t really eliminate. In short, we think this is one kitchen renovation article well worth reading.