Embudo House
Custom Living Room Furniture and Kitchenette in the Rio Grande Valley, Downstream of Taos, NM
The Living Room
The design for this project solidified when we fingered out the doors to the credenza / entertainment center. The project itself was contained to a small area but sprawling in scope - a couple book cases, a couple cabinets, figure out something to do about this sad kitchenette that was shoved into a closet, maybe build some doors to hide that kitchenette. It needed something to tie the room together.
One of the entertainment center’s main jobs was to hide a subwoofer, which meant that its door had to be transparent to sound. The solid wood paneled doors we normally use wouldn’t work, but cloth does really well. We didn’t think they had quite enough going for them as just bare cloth, though, so we put the cross hatch of walnut wood in front of them and something really beautiful was born.
We settled on using hickory wood with walnut details and walnut slab tops. The hickory we ended up with had a lot of red heart so we composed it to use the white sapwood to actuate the edges and centers of things. It’s an older house (a log cabin built in the 1800. Let me tell you that those walls were neither straight nor flat…) so we stuck to a more traditional design for the shelving and cabinets, allowing the beauty of the wood and the detailing of the doors to really shine.
The door pulls are milled out of a solid piece of walnut and are a pleasure to use. We designed them specifically for this project to add a modern, playful, flare.
Kitchenette Rebuild
Maybe it’s too strong to say that the kitchenette that was installed before we got there was a horrid, ill-conserved thing. It was a challenging problem - about ten square feet of space needing a sink, mini fridge, hood vent and as much storage as we could give it.
The previous kitchenette . Not all custom is created equal.
We settled on open shelving, both top and bottom, to keep things as light as possible. The door to the hood vent matches the rest of the living room and shelves are all hickory to keep things consistent. Lighting was added under the shelves to keep things bright. The countertop we chose was a beautiful black granite to mirror the dark walnut tops on the living room casework and the backsplash a white tile for brightness.
