The Whitfield kitchen

A bright painted-maple kitchen with white oak accents and a full-slab marble backsplash, in a 1939 colonial.

The Whitfields wanted light without losing the colonial’s formality. Painted maple perimeter cabinets from the shop, glass-front uppers on the hutch wall, and white oak open shelving keep it warm; a single slab of honed marble runs the backsplash without a grout line in sight.

The project also solved a fifty-year problem: the back door now lands in a real mudroom, built into what had been a broom closet and three feet of hallway.

“Standing in their shop next to our half-built cabinets was the moment this stopped feeling like a leap of faith.”

The Whitfields