Kitchen Remodel with Open Shelving and Pro Range in Sherman Oaks

The property

A 1989 single-family home in Sherman Oaks. A closed galley kitchen with a soffit above the upper cabinets, a small four-burner domestic range, and a wall separating the kitchen from the dining room. Around 3,000 square feet of house served by a kitchen designed for a household that cooked once a day.

What the client asked for

The client cooks seriously. She asked for a professional gas range, open shelving instead of upper cabinets on the run beside the window, and for the wall to the dining room to come out so she could talk to people while she worked.

What we found on site

Three things that changed the plan. The wall she wanted removed was carrying load, so it needed a beam and proper bearing rather than simply being taken out. The existing gas supply and the electrical circuits were sized for a domestic range, not for a professional one, and a pro range also needs real make-up ventilation rather than a recirculating hood. And the wall she wanted open shelves on was a plaster-over-masonry section, which is a different fixing problem entirely: open shelves loaded with cast iron and stoneware put a lot of leverage on a small number of anchors.

How we worked, in order

1. Verified the load path before pricing the wall removal, and detailed a beam with proper bearing down to the foundation rather than assuming the wall was a partition.
2. Stripped out the soffit, the uppers and the old range, and took the ceiling back to a single plane so the new kitchen does not have a step in it.
3. Upgraded the gas supply and the circuits for the range, and ran a properly ducted extraction to outside with make-up air, not a recirculating hood pretending to be one.
4. Set the beam, then made good and skimmed so the opening reads as if the wall was never there. No trimmed-out header, no giveaway.
5. Blocked out the shelf wall behind the finish so every shelf bracket lands in structure. This is the whole job on open shelving and it happens before anything is visible.
6. Tile, then cabinetry and counters, then the range, then the shelves last so they can be levelled to the finished surfaces rather than to the rough ones.
7. Levelled the range to the counters and the shelves to each other by eye as well as by laser, because in a kitchen the eye reads the line between two shelves before it reads a level.

The decision we are proud of

Blocking the shelf wall out in structure instead of relying on wall anchors. Open shelving looks like the easiest part of a kitchen and it is the part that fails most often. A shelf 300mm deep with a stack of plates on it puts most of the load as a pull-out force on the top fixing, and in plaster or masonry an expansion anchor in the wrong spot will hold for a year and then loosen quietly. Once it moves the shelf never sits level again and the fix means opening the finished wall. Doing the blocking first costs half a day and it is the reason those shelves will still be level in ten years.

What we talked her out of

A recirculating hood over the professional range. It was cheaper, it avoided cutting through the wall, and it would have been a mistake. A serious range produces heat and moisture that a filter hood simply pushes back into the room, and in a kitchen open to the dining room that means grease on the dining-room ceiling within a year. We ducted it properly instead. If a contractor agrees to a recirculating hood over a pro range without arguing, that tells you something.