I thought finishing our kitchen would make me happy – I was wrong

Strategist and content creator Francesca Swan is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on the concept of 'Everything' and what makes a home special to you. See the rest of her articles here.

It was 11pm one random Tuesday, when something truly magical happened to me.

I was sitting in our newly completed kitchen after an impromptu few hours of styling faffery. Funny to think that one evening was all it took to finally complete a room, which had been eighteen very painful months in the making.

Suddenly, a sense of total belonging, contentment and joy submerged me. A true breathtaking Everything moment that will stay with me forever.

The realization that I’ve never lived anywhere that feels so completely like home as this apartment.

After eighteen months of living with a temporary kitchen in amongst the chaos and dust of the build, it hit me that I was now standing in a finished room that simply hadn’t existed before, with a fully working kitchen, no less.

It makes sense that the metamorphosis of our house finally transforming into our home happened in the kitchen. After all, it’s the heart of the apartment, serving many purposes – ones you become very aware of after washing dishes in the bath and eating dinner in bed. Not to mention, one of the biggest investments in our quest for the perfect home.

Yet it wasn’t simply that it felt beautiful and practical. More so, that the new build extension now truly belonged to our original Victorian apartment. A natural continuation of our home, opening into the garden and connecting the summerhouse beyond.

The reclaimed French doors leading to the garden share the same period features as the original living room windows. The Bavarian oak chevron floor, the marble glowing with kaleidoscopic beauty, the bronze radiators and hardware – all mirror the accents and natural threads already established throughout the main apartment.

For the first time, I wasn’t looking at a room imagining what it might become. I was simply enjoying where I was and marvelling at just how much space we finally had after months of surviving in one room.

In that moment I realized we weren’t just finishing a renovation. We were finally living in our home.

Strangely, that feeling took a few weeks to land. I had been imagining a big cinematic reveal when the kitchen was completed with the marble – tears, triumph, angels descending over the Rosso Levanto, trumpeting and singing to the skies. Instead, it was a rather flat “right, well that’s done then. What’s next?”

Looking back, I think that’s because exhaustion often arrives before celebration. For me at least, emotional connection and joy only really settle once I stop trying to create the perfect room and simply start living in it.

Finally, being able to enjoy and appreciate the achievement and significance of the finished kitchen also reminded me of something much more practical: kitchens are won or lost long before you choose the worktops, cabinet colours or taps. The important work happens in the planning.

The decisions that really matter

There’s no getting around it – for many of us, myself included, kitchen planning and design can be very overwhelming. So much to consider, so much choice, so many opportunities to get it wrong.

Thankfully on my second renovation and kitchen design, I had a little knowledge under my belt, although still a tad wobbly with confidence. However, I knew enough to do three things immediately.

First and foremost, looking objectively at our space and thinking about the nuts and bolts of our we live and what the space needed to do to work for us.

What appliances and storage do we absolutely need? What would intuitive organization look like? What did we hate and love about our last kitchen? Which cupboards will we open twenty times a day? What do we own now, what might we own later and where will it all go?

Next up, let my Everything instinct guide me to a design starting point that would anchor the scheme and hold the room together: the marble.

Starting here made everything else easier to figure out. The investment in the stone naturally led us towards a high-low mix – off-the-shelf cabinets, bespoke doors and colours chosen to work with the marble rather than compete with it.

Last but definitely not least, find a brilliant kitchen designer

A favourite motto of mine “You don’t know what you don’t know”, is a timely reminder that experts exist for a reason. Time spent with a good kitchen designer is never wasted. Kitchens are complex spaces, packed with decisions you don’t know you need to make until somebody asks the question.

One of our best decisions was allowing the designer to challenge our assumptions and solve problems we had not spotted, with solutions we didn’t know existed.

As is so often the way, beauty came at the cost of practicality. The marble counter and splashback meant no overhead cupboards, an integrated extractor hob sacrificed even more cabinet space to house it, and no plug points.

How then to create enough storage for what we needed?

Thank the kitchen angels for the full height double wall of pantry doors running into my office which solved all our storage problems.

Not forgetting the appliance garage; pocket doors opening from the end of the pantry hiding our appliances, which effortlessly slide out to the counter, with the marble running seamlessly into the cabinet as a naturally intuitive part of the kitchen.

A Quooker tap also removed the need for a kettle, streamlining the kitchen even further.

There is no clutter, no parade of plug sockets and appliances fighting for attention: just the marble. Those practical decisions are not especially glamorous, but they are the ones that quietly improve your life the most. The same goes for appliances.

Appliance research is not something I enjoy and there is a lot out there. We worked with the kitchen designer first to understand the options and create a shortlist, from which I used AI to investigate and score the final choices.

It is also worth remembering that many kitchen suppliers will price match. We made brilliant, much needed savings by narrowing down our choices, building a comparison spreadsheet, doing proper price searches and then taking the lowest prices back to our supplier.

I am very pleased, and hugely relieved, that it has worked out brilliantly. The kitchen is simple and intuitive to use and makes the best possible use of the space.

Choosing colour with confidence

My Everything marble was always the star of the show, and the rich variety of veining in the Antico Carrara and Rosso Levanto provided much scope for inspiration.

This was both wonderful and challenging in equal measures. So much beauty means so much choice. Not always helpful.

Add to that, the light in the room is complicated. With two huge rooflights, clerestory windows and French doors, with a south-west orientation – when the sun is out, it is really OUT. Colours shift dramatically, not just throughout the day but also through the seasons.

I locked our cabinet colour in early, matched closely to subtly accent and highlight the character of the Rosso and Antico.

The wall colour, I confess, is still a work in progress – less said on that particular conundrum the better. Needless to say, take your time with paint sampling, and if in doubt, get the experts in.

Styling with meaning

Once the cabinets and marble were finished, the fun could finally begin. Or at least, it should have.

Instead, I found myself overthinking every single detail. I had built the marble up into such a sacred design deity that everything around it needed to be equally incredible and worthy. Nothing like some self imposed pressure to inspire creativity.

Eventually, I gave myself a metaphorical shake, took myself back to my moodboard and stopped trying to style a perfect kitchen and instead styled our kitchen.

I always use my Everything instinct as a lifeline when I lose my way creatively. When you know and believe in the things you genuinely love, collect and curate them with meaning and consideration, you will always create spaces that you feel intuitively connected to.

Natural materials sit at the heart of my design language, so the marble was a north star that drove the kitchen from the very first moodboard.

It worked. The polished Rosso Levanto highlights its extraordinary range of coloured veins, while the honed Antico Carrara brings a warm, soft contrast. Together they show two very different sides of stone: organic and timeless, but also bold and unexpected.

From there, every piece became another conversation with the marble.

Bronze and aged brass form another material thread throughout the apartment and continue here; from the cast-iron radiators to the hardware. These are subtle connections, but they help the new extension flow cohesively with the whole apartment.

I am instinctive with styling details and if something begins to feel too matchy-matchy or tied to one particular style or era, that’s my cue to go in the opposite direction.

Not conflict. Just enough tension to keep my eye moving.

In the best possible sense, I do not want the room to feel coordinated. I want interesting and unexpected conversations between objects that make me stop, think and feel. My magpie eye for these pieces is well trained, but also slightly irrational with often inconvenient timing.

My endearing love for a mismatched chair

I have a habit of buying expensive one-off chairs when we have zero budget, inevitably leading to awkward conversations with my understandably irate other half.

The age-old trick of hiding new clothes at the back of the wardrobe before wearing them with a nonchalant, “I’ve had it for years”, unfortunately, does not work with chairs. Nevertheless, I managed to style it out. Literally in this case…

My beloved vintage Brutalist-inspired metal chairs bring sensual, sculptural curves. The graphic Art Deco-style metal chair sat on my wishlist for two years before being reduced to clear, at which point I obviously snapped it up.

The set is completed by a pair of elegant wicker chairs from a sublimely stylish Parisian apartment I spotted in “Call My Agent!” I screen-grabbed them, launched an enthusiastic detective mission and eventually tracked down a realistically priced copy.

None of the chairs match. Which is entirely the point.

Each has its own thoughtful form, texture, personality and history, yet share gentle bronzed and softly golden tones. Every piece exists beautifully in its own right, while still working as part of a harmonious whole.

A room that tells a story

That gentle tension is something I seek to create everywhere in our home.

The black kitchen table is soon be replaced by my live-edge oak office desk, cut down and painted a beautiful statement colour to provide contrast against the marble.

Every piece of art has meaning and tells our story.

There is the framed Hockney print from an exhibition we went to years ago. My beloved limited Geoff MacCormack David Bowie print the other half surprised me with one Christmas. The framed Yves Saint Laurent postcards from Le Jardin Majorelle, bringing another accent of colour and memory of a special trip.

The softly curved opaque glass vase bought for me by my mum to bring some much-needed style to my first student flat.

Alongside those are newer pieces – I adore Serax for beautifully considered accents. A contrasting teal, almost Dalí-esque vase that introduces a sharper, graphic form that plays against the curved lines of the chairs and the graphic metalwork of the Art Deco chair.

Two delicate green tinged glasses subtly catch the light, drawing out the green veins of the Rosso. A black wire fruit bowl adds an unexpected moment of industrial rawness against the softness of the marble.

There are extravagant faux flowers, because I have Elton John tendencies towards flowers without Elton John’s budget.

Lots of shape, colour, material, light, texture. Pieces speak to each other without feeling married to each other.

It won’t be for everyone, but that should be the point of what we create in our homes. It should be unique and just for us.

A kitchen that made our house feel like a home

The kitchen taught me far more than I expected. Start with one Everything decision, instead of fifty random ones. If in doubt, lead with natural materials and their extraordinary emotional power and beauty. Never forget the value of brilliant designers and craftspeople. Most importantly, trust your intuition. More often than not, it already knows the answer.

The “finished” kitchen is not perfect. But no room or home ever is. There is still snagging to complete. The wall colour needs sorting. The table is a work in progress, as is the art.

But those unfinished edges don’t feel like failure, rather the realities of life and wonderful opportunities for more creativity and invention.

I’ve let go of the triumphant reveal with perfect styling and instead am embracing the prospect of it slowly organically coming to life, as I find fun in the details and trust my vision.

The anticlimax has lifted and the joy returned.

Even in it’s ever evolving state, I can still see beauty and meaning everywhere, not because every piece is expensive – far from it – but because every decision means something.

I finally feel I’ve come home.

This is where we are meant to be forever. The dust and chaos has lifted to slowly reveal something special and deeply personal. I feel proud and grateful for what we have achieved, survived and learnt.

For me, that is what an Everything home means. Not a perfectly designed home. A deeply personal one.