Clean platter home with simple, strong palette by designer and homeowner Melvyn Kanny,

Connecting a kitchen to its surroundings is a balancing act. On the one hand you want the workspace to appear as part of the living areas; on the other, the kitchen is often the hub of the home, so deserves a little limelight of its own.

In this kitchen, created by designer and homeowner Melvyn Kanny, what you see is only half the story. Through a door to the rear lies the wet kitchen, used for Asian-style food preparation and cooking. The dry kitchen, for Western-style meals, is intended to meld with the surrounding open-plan, double-height living spaces, says Kanny.

"The contemporary home has an emphasis on green design and is built from sustainable pre-formed concrete. The kitchen island is also in concrete, for a visual and textural connection. In fact, its simple shape and waterfall end echo the linear forms of the house."

With gray the predominant hue, there are several colorful counterpoints through the home. The internally illuminated swimming pool is one, and the mandarin orange cabinetry and accompanying ruby-red bar stools and adjacent dining chairs provide others.

"Lighting also plays a pivotal role," says Kanny. "Internal lights on the frosted glass cabinets on the island, and cove ceiling lights throw additional illumination into the room. Together with the pool lighting, these give the space a different character at night for example, the cove lights refract through the wine glasses hanging below."

The kitchen also melds with the dining area, in the sense that it presents a servery or bar-like appearance, a result of the glazed cabinetry, the industrial-style wine cooler, and the suspended wine glasses.

"In keeping with the green agenda, most materials are VOC-free, such as the cabinetry carcasses, or recycled, such as the black basalt flooring," Kanny says.

Story by: Charles Moxham