The kitchen is the most complex room in a home to design well. It has to function as a precision workspace — one that can absorb the chaos of daily cooking, accommodate multiple people, and perform reliably for years — while simultaneously being one of the most visually prominent spaces in the house. It's also, in most homes, one of the most expensive rooms to build. The decisions made in kitchen design have more long-term consequences than almost any other interior choice.
At JAC Interiors, kitchens are one of the spaces we invest most heavily in thinking through. We've designed them across a wide range of home types, from tight galley renovations in older West LA properties to expansive open-plan chef's kitchens in Westside estates and new construction homes in South Florida. Here's how we approach the work.
Start with the workflow, not the aesthetic
The most common mistake in kitchen design is starting with how the kitchen will look rather than how it will work. Aesthetics matter — enormously — but a kitchen that doesn't function well for the people using it is a failure regardless of how beautiful it photographs.
Before any material is selected or any cabinetry layout is drawn, we need to understand how the kitchen is actually used. Does the client cook seriously and regularly, or occasionally? Do they entertain, and does the kitchen function as part of the entertaining space or separately from it? Are there multiple cooks who need to move independently? Is there staff cooking? Are young children in the household who need to be supervised from the kitchen?
These questions shape every decision that follows — the work triangle or zone layout, the island dimensions and configuration, the appliance selection, the drawer and cabinet organization, and the relationship between the kitchen and the adjacent dining and living spaces. Getting this right is the foundation. Everything else is built on it.
Kitchens
The island: centrepiece and workhorse
In most contemporary luxury kitchens, the island is the central design element — both functionally and visually. It needs to do a lot: provide prep space, house appliances (dishwasher, warming drawer, wine fridge), offer seating for casual dining and conversation, and anchor the visual composition of the room. Getting the island right is often the most important single decision in the kitchen design.
Size is the first consideration. An island needs at least 42 inches of clearance on all sides that see significant traffic — 48 inches if there are two cooks working simultaneously. An island that feels generous in a floor plan often feels cramped in reality because the clearance hasn't been properly accounted for. We always model this in three dimensions before finalising the dimensions.
The island is also the most natural place to introduce a contrasting material or finish — a different stone, a different cabinet colour, a different surface treatment — that creates visual interest without complicating the overall palette. A kitchen with white upper cabinets, warm wood lowers, and a dark stone island reads as layered and considered. The same kitchen with three matching materials throughout reads as flat.
Stone and surface selection
The countertop material is the material most people spend the most time looking at and touching in a kitchen, which makes it one of the most important selections in the room. It also needs to perform: heat resistance, stain resistance, durability, and ease of maintenance are all real considerations in a working kitchen.
Our most frequently specified countertop materials for luxury kitchens:
Quartzite — Natural stone with the visual warmth of marble but significantly better hardness and resistance to etching. The best quartzite — Taj Mahal, White Macaubas, Sea Pearl — has beautiful movement and a warmth that marble can match but engineered surfaces rarely can. Our default recommendation for clients who want natural stone without the maintenance anxiety of marble.
Marble — Still the most beautiful countertop material and genuinely worth the maintenance for clients who understand and accept the patina it develops. Calacatta and Statuario marbles have a veining that no other material replicates. Best used in kitchens where the owners cook regularly enough to develop a relationship with the material's quirks rather than fighting them.
Honed concrete — Exceptional for kitchens with an industrial or raw-modern aesthetic. Custom-cast to the exact dimensions required, with a matte surface that reads beautifully in photographed and natural light. Requires periodic sealing and develops a patina over time that most clients love.
Dekton and sintered surfaces — Engineered materials that offer near-indestructible performance: heat-proof, scratch-resistant, stain-resistant. The best of them — particularly the thicker slabs in stone-look formats — have become visually credible alternatives to natural stone for clients who prioritise performance above everything else.
Kitchens
Cabinetry: the architecture of the kitchen
Cabinetry represents the largest cost item in most kitchen renovations, and for good reason — it's the structural and visual framework that everything else hangs on. In a luxury kitchen, cabinetry is typically custom or semi-custom, allowing precise control over dimensions, materials, finishes, and interior organisation.
The most enduring luxury kitchen aesthetic in contemporary residential design combines a refined, restrained face — flat-panel or simple shaker-profile doors, minimal visible hardware, clean lines — with exceptional interior organisation. The outside is calm and controlled. Open a drawer and it's all precision-machined dividers, soft-close drawer boxes, and exactingly organised storage. That contrast between exterior restraint and interior perfection is one of the hallmarks of a well-designed contemporary kitchen.
Painted finishes have largely replaced stained wood as the dominant upper cabinet material in contemporary luxury kitchens. Warm whites, deep greens, navy, and charcoal have all had significant moments in the last several years. Wood has returned strongly as a lower cabinet and island material — particularly warm, vertical-grained species like white oak and walnut, which bring textural warmth to what might otherwise feel like a cold, all-painted environment.
Lighting the kitchen
Kitchen lighting is frequently under-designed. The default — a grid of recessed downlights — provides functional illumination but creates a flat, clinical environment that's pleasant to work in and unpleasant to exist in. A well-lit luxury kitchen layers multiple sources: task lighting under upper cabinets to illuminate the work surface directly; pendants over the island that serve as both functional and decorative elements; a statement fixture or pair of fixtures that marks the kitchen as a designed space; and ambient lighting, on dimmers, that allows the room to shift from a bright cooking environment to a warm, inhabited one in the evening.
The choice of island pendant is one of the most visible design decisions in the open-plan kitchen. It needs to be scaled to the island — for a typical 4-by-8-foot island, a single large pendant or a pair of medium pendants works better than three small ones — and to relate to the material palette of the room. Unlacquered brass, matte black, and smoked glass are all currently strong choices that photograph well and hold up over time.
The kitchen and the open plan
In most contemporary homes, the kitchen doesn't exist in isolation — it's part of an open-plan that includes dining and living. This relationship has major implications for how the kitchen is designed. The kitchen needs to read coherently as part of the larger space while still being clearly its own zone. The materials should rhyme — not necessarily match — with what's happening in the adjacent rooms. The visual organisation of the kitchen, as seen from the living area, matters as much as how it reads from within.
We always design kitchens and their adjacent spaces together for this reason. A kitchen designed in isolation, then installed into an open plan, almost never integrates as successfully as one that was conceived as part of the whole.
If you're planning a kitchen renovation or new build and want to talk through the design with us, get in touch here or call us at 310-428-2645. Kitchens are one of the most complex and rewarding spaces we work on, and we'd be glad to talk about yours.
