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Posted on 24.08.2018

Get your Curve on

There is such joy in painting outside the lines every once in a while. We love to push boundaries and try things that feel a little naughty. So curves have been high on the agenda for our kitchen design. Not a natural fit for the most functional of spaces but curves make us happy and show that you are prepared to think differently about the world – outside of the box.

Here we let you into our process and show you how we brought bold decorative curves into our space simply with paint and some nerve. We are also going to give you the first glimpse of the kitchen we have designed for the space. All about arches.

The Gateway to a Joyful kitchen is here.

We were invited by John Lewis of Hungerford, the British makers of bespoke kitchens perhaps best known for their iconic freestanding fridges and larders and bold use of colour, to design a new kitchen range for them based on our own design house Kitchen space. So we jumped at it and had a lot of fun in the process. We have gone all out with this one and we will show you the full reveal soon enough, but for now we have some process shots at the factory where our kitchen is being made and we wanted to show you how we painted our decorative door frames – the first curves to arrive in the room we have been passionately renovating for the past few weeks.

We took inspiration from the Bloomsbury group and from Ettore Sottsass. The pink also feels right at home as the whole hallway was painted this colour when we first bought the house. We are bringing back those roots in our own way. It is a pink from the Mylands Film, Television and Theatre range – FTT005.

How vibrant is that colour? We couldn’t resist – the colour told us what it wanted us to do with it. So we did it. And here is how.

Photo by 2LG

An illustration on paper is a great starting point to help you decide the shape and number of curves.

This helps get the proportions right, so count the scallops and scale it up for the real door. Do this by dividing the door measurements by the number of scallops you want.

Mark the high and low points with a pencil. We went for 30cm for each full curve, so we marked the frame at 15cm intervals.

Next do dots with the paint where you want the high and low points of the wave/scallop at these 15cm intervals. The dots for the high points should be around 10cm away from the frame (or however far you want the motifs to spread out).

Join the dots - simple

The handpainted quality is what makes it special- so go with it and don't be a perfectionist, let it be organic.

Fill in the outlines - like lipstick for your doorways.

The layers of the room are starting to take shape now - it has put a big smile on our faces.

And now onto the kitchen cabinetry...

In our excitement, we took a trip to the workshop where our kitchen design is being made at John Lewis of Hungerford. We have designed a new arched cabinet and freestanding unit with uniques colour options and reeded glass doors. Here is the first glimpse of them in production, ahead of the kitchen fit out at our Design House.

It was thrilling to see them taking shape and even without their paint job in our chosen colours, they look epic. Bring on delivery day!