Appliance.com

Our Favorite Appliances As architects who design residential interiors and kitchens, we are constantly recommending and selecting residential appliances.

Stuart Cohen and Julie Hacker are a husband and wife team with a seven- person office that does custom residential architecture. Their firm Cohen & Hacker Architects is located in Evanston, IL. Visit their website at www.cohen-hacker.com

Perhaps the most notable trend in residential appliances that we see is the inclusion of commercial quality or commercially styled equipment in high-end kitchens. Almost every manufacturer of appliances makes heavy-duty stainless steel clad refrigerators and ranges. Although many of the built-in refrigerators are offered with trim kits that allow cabinet doors to be mounted flush with adjacent cabinetry, we still prefer stainless-steel. While most of the kitchens we design are traditional, we believe that cabinets should look like cabinets and machines should look like machines. We have clad storage cabinets above refrigerators and pot and pan drawers below cooktops with stainless steel fronts. The refrigerator then appears to go floor to ceiling, rather than looking like a rectangle of metal awkwardly surrounded by painted or stained cabinetry. When drawer fronts below a cooktop are clad in stainless steel, the visual effect is similar to that provided by a range.

The exception to this aesthetic prejudice is the treatment of dishwashers, dishwasher drawers, warming drawers, and refrigerator drawers. When these appliances have stainless-steel fronts they are a visual interruption to the continuity of the base cabinets. We applaud the design of the new generation of high-end dishwashers that have their controls built into the top edge of the door and trim kits that allow for a cabinet door front to be mounted flush with the adjacent cabinet faces. For our clients who entertain constantly, we’ve put in commercial dishwashers, which only come in stainless steel. These under-the-counter dishwashers will clean a load of highball glasses or stemware in 90 seconds (although the glasses are too hot to handle for another minute or two).

We also love doing traditional kitchens with glass front upper cabinets. They reflect light, suggest windows, and break down the scale of large surfaces of cabinetry. Often, our client’s reject glass front cabinets because they imagine themselves constantly straightening and choreographing the location of their cereal boxes. Given this concern, it goes without saying, that as sexy as glass front refrigerators look, we’re not putting them in a lot of our kitchens.

We recently redid our kitchen, and our favorite appliance is the refrigerator drawers we installed. They hold bottled water, cans of soft drinks, and fresh fruit—all the high access stuff that keeps a regular refrigerator’s door opening and closing all day long. While our cappuccino maker and TV sit on the countertop, for the appliance aficionado, there are built in cappuccino makers and flat screen TV’s that flip down from under upper cabinets.

Outfitting kitchens can be great fun, and our clients tell us how much they enjoy shopping for their appliances. For us the challenge is how to integrate the ever expanding number of great new appliances into our kitchen designs. More Editorials