A decade ago we were given the task of remodeling a kitchen for the San Francisco Symphony Designer Showcase. Three small rooms were united into one. Ken Burghardt’s concept was to create an island with a 60” Wolf restaurant range, an eating bar and the most offensive shaped hood imaginable – a coffin. The idea was to show people that anything could be done with the exterior of a hood. Once you were assured that the ventilation worked properly the exterior could be anything your could possibly imagine. Abbaka took care of the liner, controls and the motor, the rest was left to us.

The idea was to create a tableaux of four windows on the sides of the hood with an additional window against a wall facing the hood. A painting by 17th century Spanish artist Bartolome Murillo served as the inspiration for the period attire. A party was to be in progress “in the hood” structure and the people across the street, or in this case above the walk in pantry, weren’t invited. Two of the windows on the hood have revelers clearly visible, one has the family dog getting a little air and the last has a young woman gazing through the kitchen window into the yard. The people “across the street” are pouting since they weren’t invited. Muralist Oenone Youngblood did a masterful job of creating just the right tone for each of these windows and the end result was very well received. Very few people even noticed that this central design concept actually served as the ventilation for the range.

You might notice that an additional design element entered the kitchen. After ripping out the walls of the three rooms, finalizing the design, ordering all the cabinets and materials the engineer came back to us and said “you need a support post” right smack in the middle of the island adjacent to the range. After much deliberation we decided to create an oak tree identical to the many oaks that graced the grounds of the residence. Ron Sasina, currently a member of the Studio Mehler team, created the tree complete with a faux “burn mark” on the side of the tree facing the commercial range making a potential huge design error into one of the biggest conversation pieces on the tour. Many people loved it, many didn’t like it at all but everyone noticed this and the party going on in the hood behind it. People understood what we were trying to do and the kitchen was a huge success.
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Noistering

Several years ago a client in Boulder, Colorado asked us to do something different with their hood. We discussed precisely what “different” meant and it took quite some time to find something everyone was happy with.

For starters, the client did not want a conventional “T” shaped hood that was wide at the bottom with the vent sticking out of the top. She wanted it open at the top of the hood. We structurally had to leave a post in the center of the kitchen when we opened up several walls. The solution was to leave the support post as needed then create a second post that would be hollow and allow for the venting of the hood to the exterior. Vibeke Paone of Abbaka calculated the cubic area needed for proper ventilation and she designed a liner and filter that would direct the moving air to the side, up and through the joists to the exterior.

This hood was over an island which meant we had to see it from all sides. The client decided that she wanted to recreate the magnificent night sky over the nearby mountains. To begin, Vibeke suggested using two different finishes on the stainless steel – polished for the mountains and brushed for the sky. The mountain range was duplicated on both the front of the back of the hood. The second task was to create a realistic semblance of a night sky. Elements of the galaxy don’t exist in one size or at the same distance so we had to literally draw the various shapes and forms on a template that was then sent to Abbaka to duplicate. They weren’t particularly thrilled with this tedious assignement but the end result was well worth the effort.

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The last item was to insert a dimmable fluorescent tube above the liner in the hood to shine through the holes to create the delicate pattern on the ceiling. The result was spectacular. When the kitchen was complete we joined the clients for a large holiday party for a host of their friends. The hood was the star of the evening. To be sure this truly novel hood wasn’t over shadowed the entire house was filled with white candles. The light was dimmed in the hood and the ceiling exploded with creating the client’s own, private firmament. The number of smiles we saw as people entered the room was enough to tell us we had a winner. In our opinion this hood was truly one of Abbaka’s finest creations.