Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1101832
32 SPRING 2019 kitchens nshoremag.com/nshorehome/ In an early design phase, the main sink was moved from the street side to a spot that overlooks the more tranquil backyard. KITCHEN REVIVAL BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO THE HEART OF A HISTORICAL ANDOVER HOME TOOK INGENUITY, TALENT, AND RESPECT FOR THE PAST. By Janice Randall Rohlf Photographs by Eric Roth P ASSING THROUGH HISTORICAL DOWNTOWN Andover, you can't miss the arresting presence of a mustard-colored Greek Revival only a stone's throw from the campus of Phillips Academy. In fact, the 1855 home was once used as a dormitory for Abbott Academy, the sister school that merged with Phillips in 1973. Among those drawn to the elegant 19th-century structure was a couple looking to relocate from Philadelphia to the wife's former stomping ground of Greater Boston. In the summer of 2011, they and their two young sons moved in. "When we bought the house, we knew we needed to address the kitchen," says the wife. "But it was a daunting project and we had a few other things to take care of first." At the very rear of the ground floor, the kitchen was neither an inviting place to hang out nor a particularly functional space. "A lot of the house felt very grand," explains Julie Johnson, principal at J. Johnson Archi- tecture, who spearheaded the project. "You made your way through a series of gorgeous, well-proportioned rooms, and then you came to a dark, cramped kitchen." While Johnson uses "circuitous" to describe the room's traffic pattern, the homeowner is more blunt: "It was like a contact sport to get your breakfast and get out the door in the morning." Ultimately, snaking past all the cabinetry and squeezing around an open fridge door lost its charm. "We were optimistic that we could live with the kitchen the way it was," says the homeowner, "but the more we lived in it, the more we realized we needed to change it." Johnson presented four options for a new kitchen design, at first struggling with whether or not to keep a fireplace whose brick wall divided the kitchen and dining room. In the end, she capitulated. "It made sense to get rid of that fireplace, let go of the formal dining room (which the family used once a year, at Christmas), and make it one larger space," explains Johnson. After all, the home had four other fireplaces. Surprisingly, the Andover Historical Society was less concerned about razing the chimney than it was about other details of the remodel, like matching a new per- gola in the back with a small existing one in the front. Once the decision was made to open up the kitchen and a new floor plan was agreed upon, the wife turned to custom craftsman David Beaulieu of Beaulieu Cabi- netry in Plaistow, New Hampshire—a family business for more than 40 years. "I valued [Beaulieu's] strong opinions and his enthusiasm," the wife remarks. "He really appreciated the historic nature of the house and what we were trying to achieve." But before Beaulieu set out to build even the small- est drawer, Johnson assigned her clients some home-