My dream kitchen (and what Alvar Aalto has to do with it)

I have somewhat of an obsession with all-wood kitchens of a particular style. I recently posted about a house with a parquet wall, which looked very good, but this room ticks even more boxes.

Everything about it is perfect, in my dream kitchen world: the particular shade of the wood; the fact it has panels on the walls too; the sliding cupboard doors with indented handles; the semi-open plan design; the continuous floor throughout, adding space with seamlessness; a casual bit of bare brick; the fact it is on the first not the ground floor; the vast windows (particularly great in front of a sink, I always feel). Sigh.

The kitchen belongs to a six-bedroomed property in Ipswich, Suffolk, currently on sale via The Modern House for £695,000. It was built in 1960 and designed by the architect Birkin Hawood (whose son, also called Birkin Hawood, is a painter of very beautiful abstract landscapes with a whiff of the modernist aesthetic about them). Hawood built the house for his own family, and a few more photos follow, which show the incredible gallery detail as well.

It kind of reminds me a lot of Alvar Aalto's first self-built house – the Finnish designer probably most famous to most people for his wiggly-shaped vases. I love Aaltar's Riihitie house, built in 1935-36 in Helsinki so much that I have a postcard – bought from the Alvar Aalto museum – of the living room hanging in the downstairs loo. It makes me wish I'd gone for wood-panelled walls every time I wash my hands. Check it out below.

(Nb, the postcard you can see below Aalto's pad, the one with the visible writing, I found at a junk market in the States. It was posted in 1976 to 'Nino and Viola' from a guy called Norman. It reads, succinctly: "On Sunday I sat around by my pool all day. Anybody who don't like Calif. must be nuts!" Always cheers me up when I read it.)

 

And, back to the kitchen: you can see where Birkin got his inspiration, 25 years later.