My New Kitchen

I wanted to share with you the plan for my new kitchen. It's one thing to hunt steampunk stuff and post it to the blog or introduce a lamp next to your bed, but I'm finding it much more challenging to design actual rooms in a way that all the pieces will work together and come in within a budget.

Like most people, I can't afford custom cabinets, so I went with the most-quality-for-your-money Ikea kitchen cabinets. "Ikea?!" I hear you saying, "How can that be steampunk?" Well, it's a challenge, but if you think Ikea is nothing but Scandinavian Modern, you may want to take a look at the Liljestad cabinets. An added plus for steampunks -- Ikea kitchens can be varying levels of DIY. We'll probably assemble all the cabinets ourselves and use a contractor to actually hang them, but if you have more time than money, doing the entire install yourself is entirely feasible.





Ok, enough of the Ikea commercial, on to my kitchen. If you want to see the specific layout of my kitchen you can see it here and here. I chose Liljestad because it has the nice dark wood I like. With lots of glass front doors, I'm hoping it will have the feel of a turn of the century Parisian Bistro.

I'm steampunking it up with a handful of elements. The light over the penisula will be Architects and Hero's Akordian Two Light.


And the backsplash will be antiqued metal -- most likely copper. Here are two of the contenders:

Antique Copper PVC wallcovering

Korel Design Tile (porcelain, with a copper, bronze, and platinum glaze) This may end up on the floor instead.

The hardware for the cabinets will likely be brass or copper bin style pulls. (Could I combine copper and brass elements? Would this get too "busy"?)

The problem I'm running into is countertop material. The sort of look I'm going for means the traditional countops would be sheet metal -- zinc or copper for instance -- but that's an expensive and impractical plan. The other traditional counter surface is white carrera marble. Now, I would love carrera marble, but it's fragile and prone to staining. So where does that leave me? Stuck. Do I use a fake carrera marble like Okite's carrara bianca? Do I find a marble that's mostly white (most of them have a lot of yellows and gold in them, which might work nicely with the brass?) Choose a manufactured stone in something that resembles travertine? Any one have other ideas?

So this is more of a "brain dump" sort of post, but I would love your ideas and opinions. Anything strike you as a particularly good or bad idea? Anything else I should have though of?