Kitchen, bath materials take natural cue
Kitchen & bath design awards reveal outdoor influences
At the beginning of 2017, interior decorators and designers were certain that nature and the outdoors would influence material and colour choices across the industry. They were right.
As the city’s kitchen and bath industry gathered last weekend to celebrate innovation and design at the Infinity Convention Centre, elements of nature could be found everywhere. With neutral palettes, mixed metals and wooden lamp centrepieces, courtesy of Art for Everyday, the 7th annual National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA) Ottawa Design Excellence Awards gala embraced the outdoors.
The theme was echoed throughout the award-winning projects themselves: Many of them featured wooden centrepieces, stone and ceramics and glass to tie the spaces together and create an overwhelming feeling of warmth. Wood’s warmth was counterbalanced with cool metals and stone and, combined with the fluidity of glass, came together to create breathtaking spaces.
Many of the projects also featured a combination of layered and natural lighting to help accentuate the beauty of the natural materials. While many of them were also open-concept spaces, none of them felt bare or exposed. The designers did an amazing job centring their designs around a few key elements, such as wine storage spaces or glass walk-in showers. In the end, all of the spaces felt airy, but complete.
Projects ranged from small renovations on a tight budget to elaborate bathrooms where homeowners could escape the real world and bathe in luxury. A crowd of more than 200 industry professionals gathered as 39 awards were handed out across 22 categories.
While all of the entries and award winners were impressive, Ottawa’s Astro Design Centre dominated the gala with a grand total of 12 awards dispersed among Julia Enriquez, Janik Lemery, Walter Bunda, Nathan Kyle and Dean Large. Their high-quality projects were impressive and incredibly beautiful. However, Dean Large stole the show with four awards, including People’s Choice: Bathroom.
Large also won the award for Best Transformation: Kitchen, where he took a small, typical 1950s kitchen with beige melamine and Formica counters and transformed it into an open space with a sloped cedar cathedral ceiling, anodized aluminum windows, Canadian limestone island and a massive walnut butcher’s block. He added high gloss lacquer in a deep shade of azure to differentiate the dining area from the work area and used stainless steel to play up the cool colour palette, which balanced the warm hickory floors and cedar ceiling.
The home now houses a beautiful modern-midcentury kitchen with ample room for dining, lounging by the fireplace and beautiful windows to enjoy the view.
“The biggest inspiration for my designs is usually the clients themselves. I interact with them and listen to them talk about how they want to live their lives and that translates into the design itself. So, the client is really the inspiration for the design,” says Large.
Marissa Brisebois of Distinctive Bathrooms and Kitchens, who was awarded 1st place for Bathroom: Classic/Traditional, price group A, echoed a similar sentiment — it’s all about listening to the client and being inspired by the space’s potential.
“It’s just meeting with the clients. They wanted a separate tub and separate shower so it was just finding a really unique way to give them that while still keeping a consistent space. To make the room look bigger, I went with a free-standing tub and I did a half wall around it in order to give it the space and function of extra shelf space,” says Brisebois. “I made the shower bigger and used really funky, really cool tiles and designs.”
The completed design incorporated a ‘wow’ factor with twists on traditional products and installation techniques. She also used weathered cabinetry for natural warmth and semi-polished semimatte tiles for easy cleaning and a textured visual effect. The result is an elegant space that will stand the test of time.
The NKBA Ottawa Design Excellence Awards gala was a true display of our local kitchen and bath industry. The designers here are dedicated to their clients and craft a new masterpiece with each unveiled project.