Casa Gardens

One room, done properly

Casa Gardens was a focused brief: a new build apartment where we were responsible for the kitchen alone — design it, manufacture it, supply every element, install it.

A single-room commission is unforgiving. There is nowhere else in the project to make up for a layout that does not work, and the client judges the whole engagement on one space.

Working inside someone else's programme

The apartment had a general contractor running the wider build, so our work had to slot into their sequence rather than set its own. Services first-fixed to our drawings before walls closed. Floor levels and wall finishes confirmed before anything was cut. Delivery timed so a finished kitchen did not sit on a site still taking deliveries.

Most kitchen failures are coordination failures, not design ones — a socket in the wrong place, a floor 15mm out, a unit that cannot be carried through a finished corridor. That coordination was the bulk of the job.

Layout before finish

The plan is organised around the working triangle — sink, hob, cold storage — with uninterrupted run of counter between the preparation and cooking zones, and tall storage pushed to the ends where it does not break the worktop.

Everything else follows from that. The finishes are restrained because the layout is doing the work.