Kitchen Project Valladolid
- Project: ÁBATON
- Photographs by Belén Imaz
The kitchen of Project Valladolid sits beneath a pitched roof of light wood, and that defines it before any piece of furniture does. The CLT panels, the structural system of the whole house, are left exposed on the sloping ceiling: pale boards rising to the ridge that give a single-storey kitchen the height of a barn. The light that enters through the window bounces off that wood and turns warm even on grey winter days.
We were commissioned to build a sustainable, comfortable single-storey house for a family who wanted to live together, and the kitchen is where that happens. A white island concentrates the working area and brings whoever is cooking together with whoever sits on the stools on the other side; behind, the white cabinets merge into the wall so that what stands out is the oak table, the wooden chairs and the brass lamps hanging above it.
We resolved the relationship with the outside in two movements. Towards the living room, the kitchen forms a continuous sequence that ends at the great south-facing window, the one that slides into the wall and turns the main room into a porch. Towards the garden, a glazed opening of its own gives the dining area onto the planting of salvias and lavenders. And on the façade, a window of horizontal louvres among climbing plants lets the laid table be glimpsed from outside.
It is a kitchen without gestures: wood, white, brass and the garden on the other side of the glass. The sustainability of the house —solar panels with batteries, joinery and elements reused from earlier buildings— is not on display here. It is felt in the temperature and in the quiet of a timber structure.
