The 2019 FHB House is a modern take on a traditional neighborhood home in a New Urbanist planned community outside of Louisville, Kentucky. The aesthetic is a nod to house styles found through historic southern cites but the choice of building materials and amenities is distinctly modern.
Cabinets and Countertops Are the Focal Points of a New Kitchen
Favorite details from our own home inspire choices for the most hardworking room in the house.
The kitchen in the Fine Homebuilding House is the hub of the first floor. Located roughly in the center of the house, it looks out over the family room and porch beyond and has a built-in breakfast area off to the side. We chose high-end cabinets; the boxes are all plywood with dovetailed hardwood drawers. They are painted a very pale gray.
We really like the oversize brass door pulls we used in the kitchen of our own house and decided to use them for this project. We wanted to pick up on the brass as an accent piece throughout the kitchen and found a few different ways to incorporate brass as an inlay.
The brass hardware is the inspiration for brass accents throughout the kitchen. The kitchen has lots of storage. These cabinets are in the butler’s panty between the kitchen and the sitting/flex room at the front of the house. (Opposite these cabinets is a pantry.)Brass stock is glued to the panel ends of the kitchen island. It’s used in several places in the kitchen as edgebanding. The cabinets are painted a very pale gray that looks white in certain light.The brass accents continue on the range hood, which becomes the focal point of the kitchen.Additional storage along the refrigerator wall.A feature we put in many of our kitchens is a pullout cutting board above the slide-out garbage cans. A scrap hole in the cutting board simplifies cleanup.Lift up the cutting board to choose your knife. Integrating the knife block removes clutter from the counter and keeps the knives where they are used.By this point in the build, we had a buyer for the house who chose a solid white quartz counter. The waterfall installation takes a bit of fiddling, but looks great at the end.We used a waterfall counter on the basement bar island as well. If you look closely at the bottom of the waterfall panels, they land on a black plinth. Mistakes happen on every project, and this is how we fixed one that I made. The flooring had not been delivered when the counter was installed, and I gave the counter guys the wrong floor thickness.
Fine Homebuilding Recommended Products
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Handy Heat Gun
This heat gun is great for drying joint compound, primer and paint when patching drywall and plaster walls. Plus it can soften adhesive, get a very cold small engine to start, and shrink heat-shrink tubing.
Available in 2- to 12-in. widths, this is a good general-purpose flashing tape that sticks well to most things. It features a two-piece release paper, water-shedding layers, and good UV resistance.
The designer and builder of the 2018 Fine Homebuilding House detail why they chose mineral-wool batts and high-density boards for all of their insulation needs.
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