Rehab Diary: A British Standard Kitchen in a Shepherd's Hut - Remodelista
In our quest for more space, most of us will appropriate and convert anything with four walls that doesn’t require a building permit. With plans to tour the showroom around the country, the company is out to fulfill Prince Charles’s mandate of “high-quality kitchens for the people.” Historically the Victorian shepherd’s hut provided shelter for herdsmen during lambing season, when they needed to be near their flocks around the clock. These days, restored and newly built shepherd’s huts are popping up in people’s gardens as spare rooms, studios, and offices. Fontana introduced painted wood shiplap paneling on the walls and ceiling of the one-room interior. In The Enduring Appeal of Shiplap, we explain how to achieve this look. Working with challenging size constraints–the room is a mere 12 feet long and 6 feet wide–Fontana outfitted it with cabinets from British Standard, which offer a range of kitchen items in standard sizes (to make the designs cost-efficient, measuring, ordering, and installation is all done by the customer). A wood rail that runs along the length of the hut does double duty as both plate drying rack and storage. Behind the cabinet doors, the shelves are faced with a wood trim. A Butler Sink by Villery & Boch is inset in the wood countertop. British Standard kitchen cupboards are designed to work with or without doors, and examples of each are used side by side in the hut. Minus the doors, the shelves work well as open storage. Fontana tracked down an intriguing brass-lever faucet. The wooden plates and ceramics came from The New Craftsmen. The exterior of the hut is made of corrugated iron painted in a color matched to Farrow & Ball’s Off Black in an oil eggshell finish. In London’s Best Below Stairs Lunch, Hoxton Edition, we chronicle lunch at the British Standard showroom.