Kitchen & Pantry Design and Organization in Austin

A kitchen tells you quickly whether it was built around cooking or around a floor plan. Cabinets holding the wrong things. A pantry you have to excavate. Counter space lost to appliances you use twice a year. Nothing is broken, exactly. It just doesn’t work.

What I usually find

Most Austin kitchens I walk into have enough storage. What they don’t have is a decision about where things live. Baking is split across three cabinets. There are two of everything, because nobody could find the first one. Once that happens the room stops being intuitive, and you start working around it instead of in it.

What I do about it

I start with the work you actually do in the room — where you prep, where groceries land, who else is reaching for things and how tall they are. Then everything gets a home based on that, not on where it happened to end up. Drawers get dividers sized to what’s going in them. What you touch daily comes forward. The rest moves up, out, or on.

The pantry

The pantry is usually where the most time is lost and the most food is wasted. I decant what benefits from it, leave what doesn’t, and label so the system survives someone else putting the groceries away. The goal is that you can stand in the doorway and read the whole room in about three seconds.

When it’s a design problem, not a storage problem

Sometimes the storage is fine and the room is the problem. Bad lighting over the prep zone. Cabinets that stop short of the ceiling. An island trying to do three jobs badly. That’s a different conversation, and it’s the one I have on the interior design side.

How it works

Most kitchens are a one to two day project. I bring the containers, the labels, and a second set of hands when the job calls for it, and I take the donations with me when I leave.

More on how I work is on the organizing and interior design pages.