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Show j - ,. .. to v t '. Vi I iv'- ffiifc . v " j i. I i b- ilk THIS COMBINATION kitchen-dining area-family room is tops in efficiency and good looks. A joint effort of Armstrong and Good Housekeeping, it's featured in the magazine's April issue. This becomes a room that's got a lot of country, a touch of the city and is functional enough for anybody. Beauty, utility go together in country kitchen The "country look" (or American Country, as it's sometimes called) is one of the hottest home decorating styles around. The U-shape is the most functional kitchen kit-chen arrangement. Put them together and you have an ideal combination, from a home decorating point of view. That's what the editors of Good Housekeeping magazine and the interior designers at Armstrong have done in a joint decorating project featured in the magazine's April issue. But they've given the project a twist because they've updated the "country look." It's not "pure" country but a hybrid decorating style that takes the best elements of country decorating and streamlines them. ' ' And they've given it another twist by "" doing not just a U-shaped kitchen but a '"" kitchen-dining area-family room, one big space that flows together for maximum efficiency. The nice thing about a U-shaped kitchen kit-chen is that it puts everything within easy reach. You're never more than a few steps away from a countertop, the sink, the refrigerator the stove and so on. And this kitchen has cabinets on all three sides, so there's plenty of storage space. The Wood-mode cabinets are stained a bright cherry red and have white porcelain knobs. The countertops are white marble ( not real marble but DuPont's Corian, a man-made man-made material that looks astonishingly like the real thing. ) All of the appliances are surprise! not almond or another natural color, as you might expect in a "country kitchen," but black. Most surprising of all, it works. The red cabinets, white counters and black appliances produce a very sophisticated-country sophisticated-country effect. Flowing out of the kitchen and into the dining area-family room is an Armstrong Arm-strong Solarian no-wax floor in a white ' quarry tile pattern. The flooring plays a ."' vital role in the decorating plan. Besides furthering the country theme (quarry tiles are very country), the flooring is the space's unifying element, tying the separate areas together into one coordinated coor-dinated whole. Since there's red and white in the kitchen, kit-chen, it's patriotically appropriate that there should be blue in the dining area, and there is: blue duckbill chairs grouped around a scrubbed-pine "keeping "keep-ing room" table. The table and chairs are from Thomasville's Replicas 1800 collection. (A "keeping room" was a spot off the dining room where, in colonial times, dishes were parked before being served. A keeping-room table naturally is what they were parked on.) The family room has a custom-made bay window, also of scrubbed pine, and a bench built into the bay. The bench cu- sions are covered in a quilt-print fabric in cherry red, denim blue, sunshine yellow and tangerine. Cherry red throw pillows and denim blue ones grace the bench. The kitchen-dining area-family room is accessorized with folk art. Some of the items are wicker baskets, wooden cows and a red wooden heart. Overhead is a coffered ceiling compos- ; ed of false beams made of one bv sixes stained to match the scrubbed pine. Skylights at each end of the room admit loads of sunshine. The final result, of the designer's efforts ef-forts : a room that's got a lot of country, a touch of the city and is functional enough for anybody. U shapes and' downhome decorating definitely do go together. |
