Katherine Salant
Washington Post

Last week, I saw the most remarkable kitchen I have ever encountered.

It looked as though a dancer or a sculptor designed it.

On one side of a simple galley arrangement, the cabinets were held in the embrace of a thick, curved, black walnut butcher-block slab that was a study in movement. Rising from the floor, it flattened out at countertop height to become a work surface around the sink area, before curving up. Then, in a serpentine gesture, the slab turned back on itself, flattening out again to support the wall cabinets, before turning up again toward the 12-foot ceiling.

Opposite this study in butcher-block dynamism, a second curved slab rose from the floor, flattened out to be a work surface around a cook top, and then curved back down to the floor, like a dancer doing a backbend. Unlike the sink side with its cabinets, the space below the cook top held an open rack for storing pots and pans, a subtle gesture that made the space in the long and narrow 13-by-40-foot room feel more generous.

The mastermind behind this remarkable display was Johnny Grey, a British kitchen designer with a background in architecture and a refreshingly different approach to domestic spaces.

“I try to make the design more pleasurable and include things that the owners will love. What makes someone love an object? Sensuality, curved shapes, light and movement. I also like to stretch the possibilities of wood,” Grey said in an interview after my visit to his project. The kitchen was in the Showtime House, a Manhattan decorator showhouse sponsored by Metropolitan Home magazine and the Showtime Network.

Although not well known by the American public, Grey’s ideas have influenced kitchen design in this country for more than 20 years.

In the mid-1980s, eschewing conventional kitchens with their matching fitted cabinetry, Grey introduced the “unfitted” kitchen, which featured an assortment of unusually shaped, non-matching, custom-built cabinets. Emphasizing what he calls “soft geometry,” his pieces are often round (as in a circular food preparation island or a floor-to-ceiling cylinder for storing large pots and pans) or curved (as in an entire circular kitchen).

The unusual shapes not only enhance the owners’ pleasure in the kitchen, Grey said, but also help them be more relaxed. “They allow you to move differently. You’re not on the alert to avoid hitting hard edges.”

Grey’s designs include all the furnishings for an eat-in kitchen. This allows him to create intimate family environments to easily accommodate socializing among family members and the cook, as well as the occasional guest.

In this regard, the Showtime House presented an unusual challenge. The owner and eventual occupant of the house is a bachelor who doesn’t cook but who wanted a working kitchen so that his friends who are professional chefs can cook when they come over. Grey’s solution was a galley that can easily be bypassed for a brilliantly sunlit sitting area with a profusion of exotic foliage and several engaging art pieces. It’s a spot where you can enjoy the moment and never think about food. But, when someone is cooking, the owner need only to shift to the other side of the round, glass table to converse.

Grey’s kitchens often feature bright colors and his material choices are unusual. In addition to the black-walnut counters in the Showtime kitchen, he used burled aspen for the cabinets, dark black bog oak to support the cherry refrigerator/freezer case, and zebra maple with jagged grey striping for the flooring.

For most projects Grey collaborates with artists and artisans. Their skills can produce the cabinetry shapes he wants, he said, and their passion is evident in their finished pieces.

Unlike many designers who want to control every aspect of a job, Grey gives his artistic partners a loose directive. “If you don’t give them a lot of freedom, the artists won’t give their best work,” he said. And when you allow for artistic exploration, he added, the results can be magical.

“Art elements are also a great way to personalize space,” Grey said. “People use art in every other room, why not in kitchens?”

The artistic collaboration for the sitting area in Grey’s Showtime kitchen included large photomurals by fashion photographer Paul Lange, a rug by fiber artist Liora Manne, exotic tropical foliage (including an insect-eating pitcher plant) by horticulturalist Dennis Schrader, a painting incorporated into the refrigerator case by Lucy Turner and a small tortoise shell installation by New York window stylist Eduardo Garza. Michigan cabinetmaker Paul Kropp, a frequent Grey collaborator, fabricated the complex cabinetry.

Grey’s focus extends far beyond the merely visual. He’s hardheaded about the functional requirements of a kitchen and a chef’s need to have everything within easy reach. He also tailors the ergonomic details to individual physiognomy. A critical point for determining counter height in kitchens is flexed elbow height. This is the distance from your flexed elbow to the floor, which varies enormously among individuals, Grey said.

The source for many of Grey’s unconventional ideas was the kitchen of his aunt, the renowned British cook and author Elizabeth David. For an American, Grey explained, it would be like having Julia Child as an aunt.

During his childhood, Grey spent many hours in David’s kitchen, which he said was a fascinating place. In contrast to most British kitchens in the 1950s and ’60s that had fitted wood or metal cabinets, his aunt’s had a motley collection of worn and mismatched furniture that included three hutches for storing plates, spices, dry goods and miscellaneous pieces that she liked to display. There was an enormous, elaborately carved, 16th-century French wardrobe that held large pots and pans. There were no countertops as such; instead, her large dining table served as the food prep area and as her writing desk.

Whenever visitors were there, she sliced and diced at the table facing her company, engaging them in conversation that was as important to her as the dishes she created.

From this Grey said he gained a lifelong appreciation for the pleasure that lively interactions in the kitchen can bring and for the relaxing atmosphere than a motley collection of furnishings can produce. When owners fret that open plate racks and glass cabinet doors will reveal their chipped and mismatched dinnerware, he reassures them that such imperfections will show that real people live there.