Over 55 Condo's Kitchen Sold the House!

A Furnished Kitchen, You’ve got to See it to Believe it!

Kitchen Furniture instead of cabinetry for the kitchen. It is a difficult concept for some people to understand. And yet, we buy furniture for all the other rooms of the house, so why is a furnished kitchen so hard for people to grasp? Probably because most of us have grown up with the typical kitchen that is filled with continuous countertops and base cabinets with upper cabinets hanging on the walls. Its what we know. Its what we expect to see in a kitchen. So it’s what designers design and homeowners buy.

Enter the YesterTec Design Company, a company that designs and manufactures Kitchen Workstation Furniture, a complete line of independent pieces of furniture designed especially for the kitchen. The idea of creating a furnished kitchen is to better integrate the kitchen into the open-plan family room/great room/kitchen layouts that are so popular today. Why should the kitchen look like a laboratory when the adjoining area is a furnished room full of antiques?

This trend bucking company even has a patent to safely conceal all the hot appliances like ovens, so that their beautiful pieces can maintain the integrity of real furniture. The concept of furnishing a kitchen is so revolutionary that most designers do not really know how it works. And yet it is so simple. Just create a beautiful room. Then furnish it. Just like you do in the rest of the house.

Like all new things that compete with tried and true standards, there is always some resistance. In this case, the very first question is always, " If I don’t have all those continuous countertops and cabinets, will I have enough workspace and storage?" YesterTec’s answer is to make every piece an extremely efficient worthkstation, with deeper countertops and storage systems within the ‘reach zone’ of the cook. In effect the workstations concentrate their effectiveness immediately around each appliance instead of spreading the workspace out on long runs of shallower depth cabinetry. They are designed more like commercial workstations that are found in restaurant kitchens, where the chefs really have everything they need within arm’s length.

YesterTec’s customers can be called true pioneers since they too have ‘bucked the trends’ by searching out and finding YesterTec to help them with their dream of creating their own furnished kitchen. First, they say that they are so tired of the standard cabinet filled kitchens, which was what their designer wanted to design for them. Then they start to discover how the independence of each piece allows them the flexibility to choose different styling, colors and materials for each of their pieces. They have a lot of fun creating their room layout and seeing it with 3-D CAD renderings. And then best of all, they don’t have to worry about all the technical details, they just select the styling options they want and then their entire hand-built kitchen shows up at their doorstep as a collection of furniture, not cabinet boxes and site fabricated countertops.

Another question that is always asked by skeptical, potential customers is "What about re-sale? Even if I like a furnished kitchen, what will the next owners think? Will I be able to sell my home if no one wants my kitchen?" YesterTec simply says that once you are standing in a YesterTec kitchen, the functionality of each piece and the beauty of the kitchen will be overwhelming! "A couple of years ago, I received a phone call from a lady who said she had just bought a condo in an ‘Over 55’ Long Island, NY community that had a complete YesterTec kitchen in it," says David Beer, an architect and founder of YesterTec. "She needed a new drawer knob or something, but we started talking about her kitchen and how much she loved it. In fact it had ‘SOLD’ her on the unit they bought, and there were many on the market at the time. I was still in shock that the original owners had sold their home (they moved to Florida) but I certainly was pleased to hear the new owners enthusiasm!"

The original homeowners designed their kitchen as a collection of furniture, because they could see it from the foyer, dining room, living room and breakfast room, and they did not want it to look like a normal kitchen. "They had a lot of artwork and sculpture and liked the idea of a kitchen that was filled with ‘3-D sculptural-like’ pieces of furniture unspoiled by the look of imposing appliances." says David who also explains that hiding the appliances in the pieces kept the kitchen uncluttered as well.

The mahogany Working Pantry conceals all the small appliances and handles dish storage as well. It was designed to be a bake center as well as a breakfast/prep piece since it is located next to the breakfast table.

The ochre painted Sink piece conceals the dishwasher, a hidden tray storage area and 4 super deep drawers while taking advantage of the view.

The Breakfront/Range piece to the right of the sink conceals a telescoping exhaust hood above the gas cooktop (YesterTec workstations can never conceal any gas appliance) Below the cooktop all the cooking pots and pans are stored on very accessible roll-out trays and in the flanking full extension drawers. This piece is over 30" deep, and the top cupboard is over 18" deep, so there is a lot of storage space available.

On the wall opposite the sink, a large Armoire conceals a Subzero 700 refrigerator/freezer (on the right), a wall oven and a built-in microwave oven (in the middle) and a full height, food storage pantry (on the left).

Knowing what a real furnished kitchen can do, it is hard for David to believe that people still typically only consider built-in cabinetry for their kitchens. But seeing is believing, so he is confident that as more and more furnished kitchens are shown in the media, more people will discover the simplicity, beauty and functionality of Kitchen Workstation Furniture.