Wissahickon Retreat

The couple had raised four children in this house. With the youngest off to college, they wanted a kitchen that felt more like a gathering room than a galley.

We took down the wall between the 1940s kitchen and what had been a sleeping porch, and in doing so gained forty feet of Wissahickon Creek through the trees. The floor is salvaged heart pine from a mill in Columbia. The hood is hand-hammered steel from a smith in Lititz.

The clients were adamant that the room should not look new. We spent nearly as much time aging the hardware as we did specifying it.