Styles
Modern wood kitchen
Real wood on the island or the lower run, matte polymer elsewhere: the warmth of wood without an all-wood room.
The modern wood kitchen has little to do with the oak kitchen of the 1990s. The wood is handled as flat, continuous surfaces with no frame or moulding, and almost always paired with a second, plain material: a matte polymer, a quartz counter, sometimes black metal. That wood-and-polymer pairing, also called a two-material kitchen, is now the most common form the contemporary kitchen takes in Quebec.
The principle is to keep the wood for the places you see and touch: the island, the lower run, a tall storage column, an open niche. Everything else recedes into one plain colour. An all-wood kitchen quickly feels heavy in a room without much light, which describes a good share of plex and bungalow kitchens here. The polymer does the background work; the wood carries the character.
Style markers
- Wood as flat fronts with no frame or moulding: veneer or solid wood
- At most two materials on the fronts: the wood and one plain colour
- Grain that carries from door to door, often vertical on tall units
- Wood kept to the island, the lower run or one column, rarely the whole room
- Open niches or shelves in the same species as the fronts
Typical materials
- White oak or walnut veneer
- Matte polymer
- White or warm grey quartz
- Oiled solid wood for the island
The honest limitation
Wood changes colour with light; polymer does not. Oak ambers, walnut lightens, cherry darkens: after a few years the contrast between the two materials is no longer what it was on day one. Choose a species whose ageing you like, and look at a sun-exposed sample rather than a new one.
What comes next
The materials
A style is built from specific materials, and each behaves differently after five years of use.
Take the next step
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