Custom Walnut Countertop in Amesbury
Custom Walnut Countertop in Amesbury
Countertop projects require a good deal more careful thought and planning than may seem initially apparent. After all, can’t you just make something a little bit bigger than the cabinet, and drop it in place? Not at all, in fact.
The decor in this home is characterized by exposed wood finishes, with wide-plank floors and a gorgeous balance of wood’s natural warmth and the crisp, cool tones of the paint. Everything works together to create a space that is clean and modern while also feeling homey and in conversation with the farmhouse style native to New England. A wood island top was a natural choice for this kitchen, but there were a lot of elements that had to be tended to to ensure a successful integration into the room.
First, the species of wood. With much of the rest of the wood touches in the tan and cream tones of oak and pine, our clients wanted something that would play in a different palette, so we went with walnut.
Walnut is a deep, chocolatey brown, and individual boards can have undertones of red, grey, even purple. These undertones are perhaps not always immediately apparent, but once you set a number of boards side by side they’re easy to distinguish. That means that we’re always very conscientious about which boards make it into any given project; we don’t want a piece that’s mostly made of boards in one color family to have a few outliers. Those outliers are still beautiful, and perfectly good, but they don’t belong with the others – at least not in our view. It would be easy to just grab a bunch of boards, say “they’re all walnut, what’s the difference” and make furniture that way. But that’s not how we do things.
For this island top, we went with boards that have that classic chocolate color, with elements of warm, golden caramel. The perfect look for this particular room. Walnut is incredibly versatile, equally at home in traditional and contemporary furniture and in traditional and contemporary homes. Here, we put that versatility to work for us, with this countertop acting as a sort of bridge between the more rustic – but refined – touches, and the more modern ones. A great piece of custom furniture can act as that connective tissue in a room, and we were thrilled with how this one turned out.
It’s exactly by giving each element of both our build and the space in which it’s going the sort of thought and care inherent in our design process that we’re able to consistently turn out pieces that fit their homes so beautifully. Everything we do centers around thinking and planning, so that the finished products look at home and feel only intuitive.
