A Kitchen Plan Goes from Ideal to Real

Sitting down with the Sharmas in her Boston showroom, kitchen designer Donna Venegas started off with a lot of questions. "I tried to learn as much as I could about their personalities," she says. She knew that Allison worked as an information technology consultant and Raveen worked for a software company. But were they roving BlackBerry types or sit-down-family-meal people? "They are young, plugged-in parents who are pretty casual," Venegas says. "Not wine people—more beer people." And they had no interest in bells and whistles. When she asked Raveen if he wanted a refrigerated drawer built into the island, for instance, he said that having two fridges would just confuse him. The types of dishes he likes to prepare told her even more. "Since he tends to use large stock pots, woks, and wide saucepans, I wanted to make sure there would be lots of cabinet space near the cooktop," she says. To steal back some storage space, she nixed the double ovens and consolidated the cooktop and oven into a range.