Whether for avid cooks, star chefs, seasonal hosts, and busy families – The kitchen is the heart of the home, the center of daily life. During this period of confinement where people are mostly staying in, we have recently completed a renovation project for Master Chef Indonesia’s jury and celebrity chef, Arnold Poernomo.

Set on a strategic area with ample daylight and potted greeneries, the brief was to turn the porch of their home into a show kitchen for the star chef’s YouTube Channel.

In the process of designing this project, we are compelled to keep it as personal and familiar as we can whilst remodeling the space. Hence, the material selection of the kitchen was important. We thought of materials that would age well, be robust, and be quite honest. Restraining the color palette and textures of the walls and floor similar to the existing condition became a guiding principle throughout the design process.

The first time we were introduced to the space, the brick wall on the porch was the first thing that caught our eyes upon entering – it felt warm, welcoming, and cozy like any other traditional Scottish residence. We decided to keep the exposed bricks as the core material of the project.

Scottish interiors are simple at heart, rustic affairs: when it comes to flooring, we decided to go with a cement textured granite slab that makes an excellent, durable flooring choice.

In the same way, it does with its simplicity, Scottish homes like to draw inspiration from nature when it comes to furniture and their choice of palette. Given how heavily forested Scotland is, and set in the previous functionality of this area – A porch, obviously we use lots of olive greens to dominate the space.

There’s also the nature of this project that means lots of iterations and alterations in terms of the scheme just to modify and refine it.

With a dual function of housing a busy morning and filming area, we need to be clever in setting up the spaces for food displays, racks, and storage. One of which was to combine a storage stack of dried ingredients with an open cabinet and turn it into a minibar and of course, complete with a coffee machine!

To finish up the edges of Chef Arnold’s statuario slab countertops and island, we chose thin copper sheets to spice up the space a little adding a sense of playfulness amongst the earthy palette of the scheme. The outcome is something unique, more playful, more dynamic than the normal standard of a kitchen.

Here’s to a new kitchen slash filming set!