Diana’s 1963 home in suburban Pittsburgh includes something that I haven’t seen in the flesh yet — mid century oak cabinets in a “planked” style, complete with colonial wrought-iron hardware. Planked cabinets are one of my favorite all-time looks. Of course, Diana noticed right away that her “Koenig Cabinets by Elish & Co.” are a great match for the cabinets featured in the vintage Caloric kitchen featured on the homepage of the site in the new multimedia box. I know of at least one company that offers planked door style today – Omega/Dynasty. Read on for more from Diana – including the brochure (saved from the dumpster, of course) created to market her Ryan home.
Diana writes:
…The photo of the “vintage Caloric kitchen”… looks eerily like our kitchen in our 1963 house in the overall design, the oak cabinets, the hardware, and the built in appliciances. I love that photo. We live in Mt. Lebanon, a South Hills suburb of Pittsburgh. Our house was built in 1963 and it was the spec house for this model. We still have the original pamphlet that was shown to folks who viewed the house. It has the floor plans and other info about the original house. My husband found the pamphlet in a pile of recycling papers that the previous owners of this house left for us to leave out with the trash. My husband thankfully decided to look through the recycling papers before setting them out and we were so elated to find it and so disappointed that the previous owners would think to even trash it. The photos of the exterior show what our house looks like, there are two others in our development that we’ve seen. But, the others have been updated unlike ours, which is still pretty original in floor plan and other features.
[I asked her about the few updates they’d made to the kitchen – and LOVE that dinette set, swoon!] The counters are corian, we really struggled with putting that in. I wanted something retro like Formica but my husband really wanted something without cracks and nooks. So, we compromised and got corian, which we both figured was the least intrusive of the newer materials. Yes, the floor is marmoleum, we had a lot of fun putting it in…