Page 06 · Kitchens
A kitchen for crooked walls
In a rubble-stone house from 1820, no wall is straight. So we scribed every panel to the stone – instead of forcing the wall to fit the kitchen.
Starting point
The brief
The Rauch family had spent three years renovating the old house in Fischbach themselves. The stone wall in the kitchen was to stay exposed – no plaster, no false wall. An off-the-shelf kitchen would have left gaps of up to four centimetres along it.
They wanted a calm oak kitchen with lots of storage, a tall larder unit and drawers instead of doors in the base units. The worktop had to be wood that can be re-oiled and even sanded down over the years.
So the real job wasn’t the kitchen – it was the joint between 200-year-old stone and new wood.
A straight wall forgives nothing. A crooked one forces you to look closely.
Wood and finish
Materials
Oak Quercus robur / petraea
Fronts, worktop (4 cm, full-length staves), scribed fillers
Oak to the wood guide →
Also used
- Hard-wax oil, two coats
- Soft-close drawer runners
- Fireclay sink (the client’s own)
Sizes & facts
- Run length
- 5.60 m
- Tall unit
- 60 × 62 × 228 cm
- Drawers
- 11
- Largest wall deviation
- 38 mm
How we went about it
Process
Survey with laser and plumb line
We measured the wall every ten centimetres and traced its profile at full size onto paper.
Choosing boards
For fronts with continuous grain we picked three oak planks from one log and cut the fronts in sequence.
Carcasses and drawers
Carcasses in birch plywood, drawer boxes properly dovetailed – half-blind at the front, through at the back.
Scribing to the stone
On site, every filler was scribed to the stone with dividers, cut in the workshop and fitted by hand.
Fitting and oiling
Fitted in three days, then a second coat of oil on the worktop on site.
14 weeks
Timeline
- Design & quote3 wk
- Wood & cutting2 wk
- Workshop6 wk
- Scribing on site2 wk
- Fitting & oil2 wk
4 drawings
Picture story
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