apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

One of the best ways to spend a Saturday afternoon in London is to crowd into bookstore/café Books for Cooks, a Notting Hill institution where you can browse thousands of international cookbooks and grab one of a handful of café tables to sample daily changing light meals cooked up in the open test kitchen in the back. By the time we got there at 2 pm on a recent Saturday, they were down to their last slice of coconut cake. But French owner Eric Treuille, who runs the place with his English wife Rosie Kindersley, poured us a glass of biodynamic wine from his small vineyard in the Southwest of France, and talked about this irresistible oasis for the cookbook lover that it seems to us every city should have.

The Kitchn reader Benita Larsson wrote in from Sweden to share some images of her sparkling white, inviting, immaculately organized family kitchen. After the jump, we catch up with Benita to hear about the kitchen renovation in her cheerful, charming house.

Clotilde Dusoulier started her popular Paris-based English-language food blog Chocolate & Zucchini in 2003, but she first got interested in cooking while living in Northern California, and her young modern sensibility has won her many a fan abroad and more recently at home, where her blog is now translated into French. Her first book, the Chocolate & Zucchini cookbook, was published last year.

Out today is her latest book, Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris, a personal guidebook on where to eat, drink and shop for food in Paris. To celebrate, she let The Kitchn tag along to some of her favorite food shops in the Montmartre neighborhood where she lives...

Remember London Urchin and her winning London flat from last year's Small Cool contest? We were instantly smitten with her tiny yet spacious jewelbox of a flat, but we were flat-out amazed by her kitchen. She has graciously given us an up-close look at the kitchen itself, and the story of how she and her architect came up with such a clever and beautiful small-space kitchen.

When I was thinking about kitchens that might be interesting to the Kitchn readers for the new Kitchen Tours department, my dear friends Tara and Devesh came to mind. Not because they have a particularly unique kitchen. In fact, to the contrary they have a fairly standard galley kitchen in a rental building. Well equipped and up-to-date, but certainly not unique. What is unique, however, is their pantry, which is literally teeming with all manner of dried spices, pastes, dried beans, pickled items, sauces, and specialty flours.

Their pantry is, in their own words, fairly typical of that of any Indian expat, but to anyone else, it’s an exotic cache of treasures.

Tara's house tour made it look like she has tons of space. But her San Francisco apartment is a tiny rental that measures up at only 400 square feet. She has a classic rental kitchen, too: plywood cabinets, no natural light, and linoleum floors. And yet look at what she's been able to do in this rental...

This tour comes to us from Sabra Krock, a new tour contributor and photographer based in New York City. She also has a beautiful food blog of her own at Cookbook Catchall. Welcome Sabra! Read on for the story of a New York renovation done right, in one of the smallest kitchen spaces we've ever seen.

Most people would see a dysfunctional, ill-equipped miniature kitchen in poor repair as the depressing reality of apartment hunting in New York. Not Dutch Horchem, who saw the 1950s kitchen in a Murray Hill apartment as an opportunity to negotiate the studio apartment’s price down, and roll up his sleeves to create a much better custom solution suited to the studio-living lifestyle and his taste.

Dutch is a 6 foot 2 Texan who resettled in New York in 2002 to attend business school and bought the pint-sized studio apartment a few years thereafter. Luckily for Horchem, he and his father had built their home in Texas together from scratch, so the task of renovating the abysmal kitchen seemed like a relatively minor undertaking.

Food blogger and cookbook author David Lebovitz is an American renter in Paris who inherited a narrow kitchen with a motley assortment of appliances stuffed under the slanted roof of his 650-square-foot top-floor apartment near the Bastille. “In America, if you don’t like your kitchen, you bulldoze it,” he says in his kitchen on a recent afternoon. “But renters don’t really spend a lot of money to do that in France.”

Rachel and Timothy's kitchen was just completed (too late for the contest unfortunately!) but they wrote us with a coincidence.

Rachel says:

I know we are too late to make it into the contest (we just finished our punchlist on Wednesday) but I had to send in some pictures of our kitchen after seeing the pictures of #11: Morgan's Natural Patterns. We have the exact same kitchen layout - we must both live in the Clinton Hill Coops! I thought it might be cool to see how two identical spaces were recreated so differently.

We thought so too - read on for more pics and info about their kitchen...

Name: Lucky
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Lucky and his family did most of the work on this new kitchen themselves. They find that makes this sunny kitchen all the more rewarding. The kitchen works as both a place for preparing food and hanging out with their young daughter (check out the alphabet magnet wall, made just for her!)

With the project's environmental impact and budget in mind, they chose a bamboo floor and Richlite counter tops. New windows and doors and white cabinets send the Los Angeles sun bouncing through the new space. The blue wall color manages to feel both modern and homey at the same time.

This small apartment kitchen has served this family well for 45 years. "A lot of the changes came out of necessity that comes with a growing family's needs," says Sally. Sally and her family often entertained large groups in their West Village brownstone apartment. They've also done catering, food styling, and wrote and tested six cookbooks here.

While Sally dreams of having a kitchen that looks like a butcher shop someday -- "everything gleaming stainless steel and all white tiles with old oak floors and a center island with a stove top" -- Sally, her daughter (and AT reader) Abby, and the rest of the family have many memories rooted in this kitchen. When Sally cooked for her children, she and a friend split large meat orders from a meatpacking district wholesaler. Sally's husband did most of the wiring in the kitchen himself. The window over the sink houses the mustard pot collection, which inspired Sally's first cookbook.

Thank you Sally for sharing your kitchen with us, and thanks Abby for the tour.

[Chris, our NYC writer, will bring us Kitchen Tours, starting this week. He'll be checking out the rooms of NYC apartments we consider so dear: the kitchen. Any size, any style... To have your kitchen considered, see info at the end of the post.]

Name: Leigh and Yana
Location: West Village, New York City
Kitchen Size: 5 feet x 9 feet

When Yana and Leigh bought this one-bedroom apartment, it had been an rental apartment with the same tenants for over thirty years. They set about gutting the place: all new flooring, new walls, new lighting system. They finished the kitchen early this year and plan to renovate the bathroom next.

Their small kitchen is powerful. As you'll see in some "before" pictures they shared, the old kitchen had worn out appliances, small cabinets and only one drawer.

Amber painted her kitchen and "it made a world of difference." She sent us these photos of her old space, and her bright new space.

Here is the before:

& after:

The paint color is Grand Hotel Awning Yellow, from Lowe's.

Thanks, Amber!

Obviously, we love kitchens. Small ones, big ones, simple ones, fancy ones. We love clean ones, but we see the hope in dirty ones. We love organized ones, but can appreciate chaotic ones if they're well used.

Here's a kitchen in Maine where we helped cook big meals (twenty mouths to feed!). It was sweet and peaceful. The light came in through the big window beautifully in the morning. The sink was wide and deep and it was downright pleasurable to do dishes. Back in the city, we cook in a closet of a kitchen. This was a breath of fresh, Maine, air.

Send us a photo of your kitchen, or any kitchen that inspires you.