Grand Ideas

In cool steel and glittering glass, a kitchen captures imaginations

TOM PAK admits he's not much of a cook. But you would not know it by his kitchen, stainless-steel sleek with all the right stuff. It's fit for a foodie.

"I'm a single guy," he says. "Hey, I lived without a kitchen at all for over a year, with plywood floors and 2-by-4s."

Then in March of this year Pak's kitchen remodel was complete. The Sub-Zero refrigerator was chilling, the Italian-glass backsplash was sparkling and the kitchen table was bolted through the floor.

Pak was relieved, thrilled. And he thought it was cool. He just didn't know how cool until his new kitchen won a big award.

"I love it. I just never really had the impression that it's as notable as it is," says the portfolio manager for a Bellevue asset-management company.

But SkB Architects did. And they submitted Pak's kitchen to Custom Home magazine's 2005 Design Awards. Their modern, light, whimsical design won a Grand Award in the kitchen category. It was the first given for a kitchen in the 11 years of the competition. Most winners receive Merit Awards, not the more select Grand.

"It's one of those rare times when we came to the solution right off the bat," says SkB architect Brian Collins-Friedrichs. "We felt so strongly that this was the way to go, that it was the only one we proposed to Tom for his house and his life."

The kitchen is the star of a 1970s Leschi home that SkB, Pak and Scott Engler, general contractor of Heartwood Builders, have been working to bring into the new century.

The home has a dreamy view of Lake Washington, the Cascade Mountains and Mount Rainier. But it also had this "pseudo dining area with a hanging thing," Pak says.

He bought the 2 ½ -story house in 2001. But he had moved from a new downtown Seattle condo where he chose the finish materials. Now he was living in somebody else's house — a dated deal with a 1980s remodel (purple bedroom carpet).

Pak thought, "OK, I can live with this."

But not really. Wasn't his. Didn't feel like his.

Pak left much of the kitchen's transformation to his architects.

"My take on this was, one of the reasons you go to an architect is for the creativity. I think all I said was that I wanted a cool refrigerator," he says, and then recalls a few other requests.

"I wanted a big open space; I wanted to open up the view from inside; I knew I wanted stainless-steel countertops."

The grandest thing in the grand room is the stained-oak-veneer table cantilevered with a steel base that's anchored to the structure beneath the floor. At 10 feet long, it takes visitors from the back entrance through the kitchen and deposits them in the small living room at the front of the house. The blackened-steel two-story fireplace takes over where the table leaves off, shooting the eye up 18 feet to the top of the second story and blue, blue skies.

"At first I didn't know if I was going to get the table," Pak says. "It was expensive. But after it was in, I thought, "Oh wow! It makes everything cooler."

At the moment, he and SkB partner Kyle Gaffney are locked in an architect-client debate over the kitchen seating. Gaffney wants stools to maintain the strong horizontal sweep of the table. Pak leans toward chairs for comfort.

But after that?

Pak's thinking outside the box.

"I think all the neighbors want me to paint the house. It's pink."

Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. She can be reached at bteagarden@seattletimes.com. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest photographer.