We were sitting around the bar, watching Bobby cook. His eye caught mine. I nodded toward the range hood and said, “Try it on two.” It wasn’t necessary. Even on the lowest setting, this hood was sucking up smoke almost as soon as it materialized. But this felt like our first spin in his new Porsche 911, and doing a few loops around the block at 35 m.p.h. wasn’t going to cut it. At two, the conversation fell away. The only sounds were a faint sizzling from the range and the fan. Two was as high as Bobby was willing to go. Six would have to wait for another day. I imagined the both of us being sucked up into the hood, like salmon snared from a stream.

The hood could have felt like overkill. My case was this: Yeah, it’s powerful. Way more powerful than you’ll need most of the time. But it also gives you an architectural feature that immediately becomes the focal point of the kitchen. And four more lights to make it all the more inviting. In the end, Bobby and his wife gave their OK, the decision maybe made a little easier because I reined my original concept in by a few degrees.

I’d done a bunch of kitchen renovations before, but this was the first where I literally had a hand in every detail, a responsibility I embraced with a reverence for both the homeowners and the home itself. That trailer that I gushed about someday restoring to its original glory? It was constructed by the same guy who built this midcentury modern home. He built the trailer first and then spent the next eight years living in it while he built the home. When I first laid eyes on the kitchen, it was just like the trailer: a little time-worn, but very obviously the work of a meticulous craftsman. Bobby had knocked down a wall, which opened up the space and filled me with a slew of ideas for it. I asked him to trust that I had the integrity of his home—its clean lines, specifically—foremost in mind, and he did. I’ll never forget that.

A modern, minimalist kitchen with industrial-looking elements that play off complementary and contrasting materials would bridge the generation gap, I thought. Every component would serve a purpose, and the look would follow the function. The strongest statements would feel almost commercial, like the stainless-steel, 1,200-CFM range hood, which would be more at home in the kitchen at Zahav than it is here, but they’d be more refined. I spent part of my early career cooking, and I’m in the kitchen on a nightly basis, so I approached this kitchen renovation with a chef’s sensibility. And then the designer in me made sure that those pieces were polished and seamless. The cabinets, for instance, are finished in a high-gloss enamel (that took many, many coats to get just right) and custom-designed, hand-crafted hardware. I also lined them, along with the sink base, with 18-guage stainless-steel. It’s a distinct visual upgrade over a liner, but it’s also far more practical. The stainless-steel cleans up easily, and it’ll never age.

The two inch-thick, 600-pound concrete, L-shaped counter under the cabinets and the complementary concrete bartop around the range—both of which sit atop custom-designed stainless-steel bases—were another indulgence. But the kitchen’s fairly modest in size, and the six-foot by eight-foot, L-shaped counter comprises most of its surface area. Because it would rival the hood as a focal point, I needed to make sure, as well, that I treated it with the same amount of consideration. Like the hood, the concrete counter says, “There’s some serious cooking about to go down in here.” Alternatively, when the pots and pans are soaking and the dinner party’s winding down, the bartop gives off just enough of an edge to lure everyone over to it. Awash in a warm glow from the hood lights above, the rest of the room faded into black, it has the feel of a coveted corner banquette in the waning hours of a night that’s been too good to let end.
​
Those are the moments, in my humble opinion, that too often go neglected in kitchen renovations these days. We think of the modern kitchen as a gathering spot, maybe even the gathering spot of the home, but it’s usually only one type of scene: boisterous, bright, crowded. I envisioned a room that encouraged all of the sharing that comes with that, but also nurtures the more intimate and often more memorable end of the night. A textured living space begets occupants who value character in their surroundings and those they surround themselves with.

​If I’m being honest, my initial reaction, when I was asked to create a series of custom signs for a company nearby, was probably more curiosity than it was enthusiasm. Ever since I was a kid, I took a particular pride in engineering things that stumped even the adults around me. To me, it was never a question of, could it be done? It was always, how could it be done? I approach my work today the same way. Basically, I have a hard time saying no.

But then I heard the three words that every designer pines for: full creative license. And the scope of the project changed entirely.

The client, Donald E. Moore, founded Vanquish Fencing Incorporated in 2004 about an hour downriver from me, in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. Don is a guy who’s completely reinvented himself several times over the course of an especially wide-ranging career. He landed in fencing after developing a “portable roller-top fence” that’s helped cut down on animal trespassing at electric substations, surprisingly, one of the leading causes of outages across North America. Don is also a collector of vintage signs and assorted odds and ends, so he has a keen sense of legacy. When we first met, and he described the nature of the project to me, it was clear that he was thinking about his own legacy. Young as Vanquish is, this is the endeavor that has the potential to influence generations beyond his own.

What he had in mind was three custom signs that captured different aspects of the company’s personality. After that initial conversation, I immediately began thinking of them as symbols of the company’s different eras: the past (its inception), the present (its emergence), and the future (its promise). So each has its own distinct character, though they’re all grounded in the company’s core branding. I didn’t play, for instance, with the established font for the company title or the logo, which I featured in two of the three custom signs. I also used some of the materials that comprise Vanquish’s fences, or, at least, are representative of it. That was the idea behind the mesh background in one of the signs. For another, I danced a length of barbed wire around a salvaged-wood frame. I found an old, 100-foot roll of the stuff, still bearing its original tag from Sears, Roebuck and Co., and I knew Don would appreciate the history.

I worked like a chef tasked with making a dinner that highlighted some local ingredients. Anyone could come up with something. But I didn’t want to just use a hint of this or that to say that I did. I was determined to cook some great food that made the region shine in the process. Which is not unlike how I go about crafting furniture.

Fencing’s seen by just about everyone outside of the industry as a fairly straightforward, unglamorous product. But a company is more than its product line, and I’ve found that to be especially true of smaller companies like Vanquish. These custom signs aren’t part of a larger marketing campaign. In fact, they’re hanging throughout Vanquish’s offices, largely out of public view. What they are, then, is an affirmation of its own identity. I was stoked to be granted full creative license on a project. But, for creativity to even enter into the fabrication of signs, let alone to feature that prominently, meant that Don was seeing this as something more. So I started seeing them as something more, too. And if I accomplished my mission, everyone who glances at them as they walk by will as well.