Bungalow Kitchens by Jane Powell
#7 in my book challenge for the year was Bungalow Kitchens, since we’re on the verge of updating ours. After flipping through the book, I thought the photos were lovely but didn’t think I’d get much out of the book. The photos had a lot of period reproductions of older kitchens with vintage appliances. We plan to update our kitchen, not make it look like it’s original. Yet we don’t want to plonk a modern-looking kitchen in the midst of our 1917-looking house. Reading the book cover to cover, though, was well worth my time. I learned a lot about bungalows in general, and about design choices in particular. Specifically helpful was the organization of the book by detail, e.g. counters, and the inclusion of information on how to obsessively restore, countered by compromises for modern kitchens. It was also helpful to learn that if we take a restorative tack in our kitchen re-do, then there are lots of things we can rule out, e.g. recessed lighting, thereby limiting the vast number of choices we’d have to make if we were building a kitchen from scratch or renovating a kitchen in a more modern house.