When my client came to me she had a kitchen that had been renovated to a style that was not in style or age appropriateness of the home. The home is around 100 years old and she wanted the kitchen to look closer to what it should look like for that time period. She didn't have the budget to do a full renovation to remove the cabinetry or the countertops, but was able to change out the backsplash and the cabinet doors, as well as add some cosmetic elements to the walls. 

One of the issues she had was that you could see right into the neighbors house from her windows. She really didn't want shutters or blinds as that would lose a lot of the light coming in and she wasn't fond of the look. She had curtains at the top of the windows, but that really wasn't helping, as the view was happening at the bottom half of the windows. I proposed getting pieces of stained glass made to hang from chains to cover the bottom half of the windows. This would look more historical in age to the home, would provide privacy, and would be a beautiful piece of art. After pricing these out, it was decided that for now we would go with privacy film which gives the same look and idea and was a great solution. No longer can she see into the neighbors home, she still gets lots of natural light and the historical design looks great. 

In this area, there originally were glass doors on the two left cabinets. While a lot of clients want to add glass doors, it is not always desirable. You really have to think about your situation and functionality in your kitchen. If your storage space is limited (which in this kitchen it was), the items you are storing might not be display worthy. When that happens, it can add to the look of clutter in your kitchen and take away from a clean and orderly appearance. Another down side to glass can be that often the interior of a glass cabinet can appear dark, creating gray or black spaces in the kitchen. This can add to the feeling of the kitchen feeling dark and "gloomy". Taking away those glass doors in this situation helped make this kitchen feel brighter because now the doors are a cream color giving a much brighter site line and not the gray "holes" they were creating before.

This is where our design started when I first presented to Amy. I took several of her existing and "staying" items like the counter and flooring and added them to the suggestions of what we would be changing to so she could see the overall look of everything together. 

Here you can see what the rendered vision was proposed at in the first draft. One of the wallpapers was presented along with a different style batten wall treatment. From there we made some changes and selected another wallpaper and a more formal wainscoting for her walls.