Inspirations

Kitchen of the Week: A Tiny Reclaimed Kitchen Designed in a Wink

Justine Cook of Harp Studio is deft at imbuing spaces with what she calls “detailed minimalism”—so much so that she designed her own kitchen in half an hour.

“We had to unexpectedly remove an 1980s kitchen we were going to ‘make do and mend’ with during renovation,” she says of that project. “So it was all using materials we had.”

The result was so appealing that, when it came time to design the kitchen at one of her rental properties, called Mole Cottage—a diminutive holiday let in Wales—Justine looked at back at that thirty-minute kitchen: “I was happy with the look, so I transferred the style to the cottage,” she says.

Once again, Justine worked within tight restraints—a small space; only reclaimed and secondhand materials—yet the limitations led to a kitchen that’s poetic yet efficient.

Have a look around:

Photographs by Harry Crowder, courtesy of Harp Studio, except where noted.

“mole cottage is medieval, with solid stone walls,” sa 12
Above: “Mole Cottage is medieval, with solid stone walls,” says Justine (hence the “super deep ledge” on the kitchen window). When she first bought it, it was “very floral, very 1980s,” she told us in our original post on the place. Photograph by Harry Crowder.
the kitchen design hinged on a bit of happenstance. “a few years ea 13
Above: The kitchen design hinged on a bit of happenstance. “A few years earlier we’d sourced a zinc sink for a client, but it had to be rejected due to its size,” Justine says. “We were gutted, as it’s gorgeous, and I wished I could buy it on spec anyway. Years later, when planning for Mole Cottage, I was searching for oddities and saw a corner of a similar zinc sink in a reclamation yard and grabbed it. Later I went through photos that showed it was actually the same sink. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been sold.”