Kitchen of the Week: The Refined Rustic Kitchen, Sebastian Cox Edition

“The past can be used to design and make the future,” says English woodworker Sebastian Cox, who says that his goal is to work “without nostalgia or sentimentality, but with respectful inventiveness.” His results are spot-on, especially the farmhouse kitchen that he created in collaboration with the team at deVol, UK specialists in modern classical kitchens. The Cox Kitchen manages to be both refined and rustic, clean-lined and warm-hearted, familiar and fresh.

First introduced in 2015, the bespoke design is available in many iterations and each one stops us in our tracks. Here’s our latest favorite, spotted in the basement of deVol’s showroom on Tysoe Street in Clerkenwell, London.

Photography courtesy of deVol.

The cabinets have birch plywood frames fronted by doors of  bandsawed beach in varying widths; they’re left pale under the sink and elsewhere stained (rather than painted) in an inky blue-black that allows the graining and texture to show.

Note the skinny, plank-size legs of the island; its oak counter extends out to become a breakfast table.

The standing towel rack is deVol’s Clothes Horse; £140 ($178).

The bowls are from deVol’s new ceramic kitchenware collection.

The hanging lights are DIY: They were put together from cage lights, LED Filament Bulbs, and Fabric Lighting Cable from Dowsing & Reynolds.

Here are two more examples of his kitchens:

• deVol’s Cotes Mill Showroom in Leicestershire
• A Rustic-Luxe London Galley