Mick De Giulio, the creator of whole collections of cabinetry and the head of de Giulio Kitchen Design Inc., has designed and installed 1,800 kitchens from Napa Valley to New York. But when it came to his own North Shore kitchen, he couldn’t figure out what to do.
“It was hard to narrow it down when everything is accessible to you,” the 44-year-old designer says with a shrug. “I love traditional. I love contemporary.”
As every other room in the De Giulios’ North Shore house was redone to achieve a spare-as-a-monastery look (“I think simple and spare is easier on the mind,” explains De Giulio, the interior designer for the entire house), the kitchen wizard’s kitchen remained a tabula rasa.
There he was, with an empty 12-by-12-foot addition to the classy 1925 French Neoclassical-style house he and his wife, Andrea, bought in September 1996, and not a clue.
Until serendipity struck.
A client, who had gone to France to buy antiques for his French-style estate, chanced upon a 100-year-old French butcher block of great character outside Paris. It had brass hardware trim on the drawers, a deep, carved apron, sturdy legs, and a dip in the surface from decades of use.
De Giulio, having seen pictures of similar blocks, bought it sight unseen — the idea of a French butcher block in a French Neo-classical house clicking in his mind.
And from there, a kitchen was born.
The French butcher block became “the driving piece of my whole kitchen design,” says De Giulio. He placed it like an altar to the food gods near the doorway to the room.
Figuratively speaking, there is a “butcher block” in every kitchen De Giulio does. Including that one-of-a-kind piece, one that isn’t mass-produced and is “uniquely yours,” is De Giulio’s signature.
Because of the butcher block, says De Giulio, “This is our kitchen.”
Taking his cue from the block’s width, De Giulio extended a large island from it down the center of the room. De Giulio’s own 13-year-old firm, which has showrooms in Chicago and Wilmette, cut and mitered in a preparation sink out of the soapstone at the island’s end–just opposite the massive Viking professional stove. (There’s another sink of marble in very clean square lines, another De Giulio creation, a few steps away, beneath the windows overlooking the garden. “I like that patina–an old look,” he says.)
While De Giulio says everyone in his family of six cooks, the big emphasis in this kitchen is on baking, his wife’s “passion.” She does breads, pizza and “basic great things for us, while I do breakfast things, like omelets, for the whole family,” says the father of four. “One thing she wanted was this workstation where she could be directed out more, as a part of the whole scene,” not marooned on her island, he adds.
Because large islands can often look monolithic, De Giulio–who worked with architects Stuart Shayman of Stuart Shayman Associates, Northfield, and Greg Webb and Deidre Knabel, both of de Giulio Kitchen Design–broke up the mass with a mix of Italian granite and Brazilian soapstone (“So you don’t see a sea of the same type of material”). Above the island are a large pot rack of ashwood, part of the line made by the English firm Smallbone and exclusively distributed by de Giulio, and recessed can lights. (Also important to a working kitchen is proper, softer lighting, says De Giulio. “You should be able to dim down the lights, or make sure you’re not working in shadows.”)
Also contributing to personalization in the designer’s kitchen is the Tuscan-style canopy hood over the stove, custom-designed for the hearth area and trimmed in bronzed butternut wood. The large brackets that appear to hold the hood up echo the design of the pergola in the back yard, which De Giulio loves.
The backsplash recess above the stove, a mosaic of tumbled marble tiles, adds to the country feeling. So do the large wood-faced slide-out drawers at either side of the stove. These drawers, from the de Giulio Collection and crafted by Heritage Custom Kitchens in New Holland, Pa., are used for storage of pots and pans.
Beyond what he has done with woods and stones all over the room, the kitchen walls have a subtle texture, called a Venetian finish. Simes Decorating, Chicago, created it by layering colored plaster, a kind of soft tie-dye effect of sienna on white.
What’s not in the room–the concept of negative space–is just as important, says De Giulio. “We have some open areas so that you have the feeling of space and comfort, so you don’t have the feeling of being engulfed in this sterile, over-cabineted room.”
Although a visitor fails to perceive even one, there are actually two Sub-Zero 700 series refrigerators in the kitchen, their cabinet-style doors keeping them well-disguised. One refrigerator is for leftovers and fruits, the other for bread dough.
But undetectable cold storage isn’t the latest word in new kitchens. “Comfort” is, says De Giulio. In his own home, he has created “an area of comfort” in front of the butcher block–an oasis of two old-fashioned, white-slipcovered stuffed chairs facing a fireplace and next to it, a tall free-standing cabinet with doors hiding a television set, for morning news and weather reports.
Finished last July, the kitchen is one with nothing superfluous in it. Instead, it is filled with perfectly executed detail wherever one looks.
“I wouldn’t put a stamp on it,” De Giulio says. “If anything, it leans more to Italian/French. I like the flavor of eclectic and mixes of materials. It’s more of a room with a kitchen in it, than a kitchen.”
Inadvertently, it is also an example of the cutting-edge of American kitchen design–more personal with more mixing of materials than the sleek, contemporary European kitchen designs that Americans had been mirroring in the past.
Instead of drawing from European kitchen designs, De Giulio, more often than not, finds inspiration out of context–from furniture shows such as those in Cologne and Milan.
For example, the former kitchen in his home, just outside the door to the new one, is now the pantry–one that resembles no other. Two walls are filled by cabinets of De Giulio’s own design. They are Shakerlike in simplicity, but with a more contemporary flair–a four-by-four cluster of doors in maple painted white, the windows of sanded glass, the interiors a cornflower blue.
The idea for these, he says, he got at a Milan furniture show where he saw different uses of grid systems.
“I’ve created a space where the whole family hangs out,” he concludes. “We spend 90 percent of our time in this room.” And when close friends come over, “we are also there 90 percent of the time.”
