Grace Lin and Warun Kumar wanted to get things right. They spent years planning the renovation of their historic Colonial home in Scarsdale, New York, which included relocating the original kitchen to the opposite side of the house to be closer to a more recent garage addition. After demolition began, the couple met with designer Sarah Robertson, whom they found on Houzz, to focus on the kitchen. But looking at 3D mockups, they learned that what was possible in their new home plan didn’t quite live up to the kitchen they had dreamed of. So they went back to the drawing board, and Robertson didn’t hear from the couple for several months.
Who lives here: Grace Lin, a behavior therapist; Warun Kumar, who’s in finance; and their three kids, ages 4, 8 and 9.
Location: Scarsdale, New York
Size: About 405 square feet (38 square meters); 27 by 15 feet; there’s also an adjacent 8-by-13-foot breakfast area
Designer: Sarah Robertson of Studio Dearborn
That’s interesting: The house once belonged to Walter Winchell, a famous newspaper and radio gossip commentator in the 1930s and ’40s.
When they reached out to her again, Lin and Kumar had redrawn part of the house and changed the foundation plan to include a bump-out addition to the kitchen that added 100 square feet. This changed everything, giving the couple the more open feeling they wanted, along with more cabinets and room for an eat-in area.
With the floor plan finally settled, the couple and Robertson got to work adding the bells and whistles the designer is known for in her kitchens: custom storage compartments for things like cutting boards, spices and bread; pullouts for trash and recycling; and more.
An almost 13-foot island anchors the long kitchen and features a quartz slab countertop that looks like Calacatta marble and transitions into a stained rift oak countertop.
A steam oven sits on the end of the island opposite the range. The microwave is on the side of the island opposite the refrigerator.
To get a good idea of a Sarah Robertson kitchen, Lin, Kumar and Robertson visited one of her previous kitchen designs in nearby Larchmont. This gave the couple the opportunity to see and feel custom cabinets and experience layouts and ask the homeowner in-depth questions about the remodeling process, what to expect and if there were any things they would have changed. “They feel the cabinet finish, open and shut the drawers, interact with the millwork details and walk around to get a sense of how storage was thought about,” Robertson says. “Things you can’t get from photos.”