A confident green kitchen and a hand-glazed mosaic shower in Albany. Two-tone cabinetry, soapstone counters, a custom stained glass panel, hammered copper pendants — and a built-in banquette where the lemons live.
The clients on Curtis Street walked into our first meeting with a single requirement: they wanted a green kitchen. Not green-accents, not green-island, not a "pop of green" somewhere. A green kitchen — every cabinet, top to bottom, in two shades of green chosen to read as one continuous gesture.
The lowers landed on a deep, slightly grayed moss. The uppers are two shades lighter — closer to a soft sage that catches the morning light without going minty. We mocked up four pairings on cabinet samples before the clients chose; the winning combination came from a single afternoon test with both colors hung side-by-side in their actual kitchen, under their actual light.
"Confident color requires confident neutrals. Pick the green wrong, and the room argues with itself. Pick it right, and the green carries the whole house."
Soapstone counters became the foil. Honed soapstone is one of the few stones that handles strong color without competing — it's nearly black but reads warm, develops a soft patina over years, and never looks busy. We ran it along the entire perimeter and onto the small peninsula, with a softly eased edge to keep the room from feeling hard-cornered. The clients have, in their first six months in the room, done exactly what we predicted: started oiling it once a month, and started seeing the marks where the kettle lives.
The backsplash is a 4×6 glass subway in a quiet variegated sage — softer than the cabinets, dark enough to anchor the open shelving. It carries the green palette to the ceiling without doubling down on the cabinet color.
Two pieces in the room weren't ours: the hammered copper pendants over the sink and banquette, and the custom stained glass panel hung above the cooktop wall. Both belonged to the clients before the kitchen began. The pendants we rewired and installed. The stained glass — a geometric composition in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition, commissioned by the family years ago — we framed in and lit from behind. It's the single most photographed object in the kitchen, and that's exactly right.
The bath, in a separate room of the house, takes a different approach to color. Where the kitchen is confident, the bath is meditative: a single hand-glazed ceramic tile in two-and-a-half-inch squares, in twelve subtly different glazes ranging from pale celadon to dusty cornflower. The tiles were ordered, laid out across the workshop floor, and shuffled by hand until the distribution felt random in the right way. Installation took three days; the layout took two.
We told them we wanted a green kitchen. They asked which green. Then they asked which green for the upper cabinets, and which for the lower. By the third question we knew we were in the right hands.
