New Wind is our home in rural Ontario, Canada constructed by my husband to Passivhaus standards. It is a retirement home and our goal is to be able to stay in it until we die so it is a bungalow with all required spaces on the main floor.
I love to cook and see cooking as an important, tangible expression of love. Accordingly we wanted the kitchen to be the heart of the home (some people have described the project as a big kitchen with a little house wrapped around it and that’s not too far off!). We wanted it to be highly functional – it gets a lot of use from regular meal preparation for family and guests, preserving (apple sauce, garlic scape pesto, raspberry jam, frozen corn and squash etc.) and casual entertaining.
The area we live in is very much a lower income farming community so though we wanted the kitchen to be beautiful, we did not want it to be ostentatious or off-putting to our neighbours.
Finally it needed to have two zones – the “Jan zone” where focused food preparation can be relatively uninterrupted and the “Edwin zone” where dishwashing, drink preparation and breakfast preparation can happen. Professional photos of main floor can be seen at http://tours.virtualtoursottawa.com/436242
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East end of kitchen - Jan's zone. Work triangle with comfortable distances
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West end of kitchen - Edwin's zone with dish sink, D/W, bar fridge and beverage supplies.
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Jan's appliance garage. Allows use of kitchen aid mixer without lifting it - heavy butcher block on heavy-duty sliders allows it to move in and out. Electrical plug in back of garage has a kill switch that cuts the power when the butcher block slides back into the garage. An arm to hold an iPad (recipes!!) is mounted inside garage and when garage is open, the door blocks any glare from window.
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Edwin's appliance garage with the gadgets he needs for breakfast.
