A Chef's Kitchen: Stainless Steel & Japanese Monotonal Design

2147

Japandi
HDB (BTO)
~700 sqft
2 br
Couple Living

よ！ Welcome to the kitchen. Hitotema.home is a Modern Japanese (not japandi) cozy 3 room BTO, designed to bring traditional elements of Japanese houses into the modern era. I'm a Japanese Chef and Sake Sommelier, and the missus does the 9-5 so naturally, the design and layout for the kitchen was my job.
As a chef, a few priorities came to mind when shaping the design of the kitchen. First, a minimal approach with clean lines and monotonal colourways helped to contrast the kitchen from the wood tones around the house. The kitchen can be split into 2 parts, the upper portion of cabinetry and the lower portion of worktops and equipment. The lower portion is built of stainless steel, which is resilient and tough compared to wood cabinetry that damages way too easily with moisture, fire, heat and chemicals. Besides, coming from professional kitchens, stainless steel as a material really does give me confidence in a way that I don't need to worry about my kitchen falling apart on me.
Stainless steel is usually shunned away from by homeowners for many reasons, one of them being that metal feels cold, and it looks dirty. I think that's mostly because the most common encounters of stainless steel kitchens are from the -fire and brimstone- hot sweaty hells of zhichar outlets. I think stainless steel can be beautiful. Yes, with a bit of care during the design phase, stainless steel can be textured, polished and rounded for a premium feel too.
For the kitchen of hitotema.home, we worked with ANOX Studio for an all-custom fabrication of textured worktops, non-directional matte polished doors and integrated splash guards at the rear for a showcase of metalwork at its best. I can highly recommend them if you hope to design your very own durable kitchen too. If custom's not what you're looking for, they do have a range of modular products in all kinds of colorways and finishes too to suit your needs.
The kitchen plan on our flat's blueprint was a long and narrow (1.5m in width) corridor. I wanted to maintain that openness and length of the kitchen as much as possible in terms of pathways and workflow. If you saw the first photo, you probably wondered where the fridge was. Well, here's an undercounter fridge for you. Not common in residential kitchens for sure, but a staple in professional ones. An undercounter fridge is perfect for me, and it was something I had intended to use even before looking at the space. First, lowboys double up as a worktop, so when doing kitchen prep, it's easy to take out food from the fridge while you're working, and stash stuff back when you've done prepping. Secondly, commercial fridges and they way they're built maintain temperatures better than home fridges. Not only does food not spoil for longer, I can also store sashimi-grade fish and seafood in there for use over several days safely. Lastly, from an aesthetic perspective, a lowboy is discreet. In most homes, the fridge is one of those pieces of kit you gotta think hard about where to place in the kitchen, and most of the time it's in a place further from the stoves or prep areas in order to look good, especially if your kitchen is long, or small. When you peer into our kitchen, your eyes follow a clean line of countertop space all the way to the back of the kitchen, giving a minimal and open, yet extremely functional and spacious impression. So, where's the freezer?
Right here. Next to the fridge, behind the double mesh doors is a custom chest freezer niche. Chest freezers are great. They consume minimal power while keeping your food safe and frozen (this one goes pretty low, around -24°C which is perfect for tuna blocks). However, they are quite the eyesore. So we custom fabricated a niche to hide the chest freezer, with a flip-up counter-top to access it. More workspace, less clutter.
If prep stations are the head, cooktops are the heart and hearth of the kitchen. The stoves and oven sit on the left of the fridge. This makes it easy to take sauces, stocks, prepped meats and fish from the fridge straight to the pan. I'm a big fan of hybrid kitchens. Hybrid as in gas, and electric. Gas is perfect for stir-frying and saute work, giving the correct flavour to dishes with unlimited heat. Induction stoves are energy efficient for boiling and braising where gas becomes expensive. However, home induction stoves are too fancy, and pretty underpowered. I think that's where the saying "a watched pot never boils" comes from. So, beside the burner rings is a standing (commercial, i guess?) induction cooker. It boils a litre of water in under a minute, which is great for maintaining a rolling boil on dried pasta or trying to bring large stews up to temperature. I'd highly recommend checking out one if you have no patience like me.
Atop the stove is the highly important exhaust hood. This is the one thing that separates you and the rest of your house from smelling like a kitchen (or restaurant, if your cooking is the bomb). The Fujioh has been working like a dream. I wanted an angled design so that my head doesn't hit the top of the hood every time, and yet the angle allows the hood to sit lower to the stove for better suction. Also, our exhaust is ventilating, not recirculating. Behind the cabinetry, a duct leading from the exhaust hood directs the greasy gases and odors into the service yard. Recirculating exhausts don't work, btw. Because of the ventilating hood, our kitchen is designed without doors or glass-ups. Give sgbetterhome a call if you wanna get the ducting done for your flat.
On the left of the induction stove is the rice stuff. There's no pain in my life because rice makes me happy. And, because rice makes me happy, it's important to get a good rice cooker. At the same time, this standing adjustable shelving creates extra space atop the rice cooker and rice bin for me to put this one incredibly large bowl-plate piece. This shelving also comes with S-hooks and a chopping board rest too, so that's pretty handy.
To the left of the oven is the condiment drawer. 3 tiered but with 2 hidden drawers. At an arms reach from the stove are the cooking essentials - spatulas, tongs, moribashi, saibashi, spices, shoyu, and so on.
And finally, the sink. "Why isn't your faucet like those tall U shaped ones with the springs and detachable head like professional kitchens?" Because I see those bulky things everyday, I'm kinda sick of it. I chose a faucet that was sleek and still carries all those functions people consider essential for a kitchen sink, but without that crazy looking upside-down over-engineered look. This faucet, despite how it looks, has an extendable hose head with both bubble and spray functions. Similarly, we went with a stone sink, because I'm kinda over metal sinks and how clunky and hollow they sound, or how the bottom warps or bends when something hot like a pot gets thrown into it. Also, because of the design of our kitchen and the abundance of worktops, this sink is 86cm in length to accommodate big pots, whole fish (like salmon prep) or just a massive amount of washing at one go.
Spinning around, at the back of the stoves is a niche for a microwave and a toaster oven. Above that is the drystore, where we keep our snacks and the instant ramen library we're building together. To create this space, we ate a bit of room out of our already puny service yard. Stay tuned for the service yard post.
In that same niche, just right below is the cutlery drawer. Yes, we have a ton of cutlery, but it's all different styles for different events.
And right below the cutlery drawer is the bin storage. While most of the time we don't use the big bin, it does come in clutch when doing massive prep, hosting parties or any of the sort. Having this concealed bin area helps keep the walkways clear, but yet, easy to reach and pull out when the need arises.
Phew! You made it to the end! Thanks for joining us on our kitchen tour. Watch out for our next post and follow us on Instagram @hitotema.home!