Maybe you cook a lot. Maybe you never cook but love to host. Maybe your kids prefer to do their homework at a breakfast bar and maybe your husband dreams of a scullery kitchen that keeps the shrimp shells and greasy sauciers safely out of sight.
Every homeowner has their kitchen particulars. And once the process of designing or redesigning a kitchen starts, it becomes clear, almost immediately. This space is the absolute linchpin.
“It’s the epicenter, the hub of the home,” says Matt Donahoe, founder and principal designer for Nashville’s Bureau Interior Architecture | Design. “It’s the nucleus of how families live.”
Donahoe and Bureau don’t focus their work on kitchens exclusively, but their stylistically broad portfolio does show a particularly deft hand for it. The secret? Treating kitchens as “highly considered architectural moments,” meant to “quietly evolve alongside” the homeowners.
“Most of our projects are multiyear,” Donahoe says, “so we’re seeing clients through a large portion of their life. We want to make sure that we’re always designing for what’s beholden to them in the future. What’s going to be their life in five more years? Are they staying in this house forever?”
THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL
Knowing where they’re going means knowing where clients are — their needs and patterns, practicalities and preferences, tastes and tendencies. So even getting to the starting line for a timeless kitchen design requires an intense level of curiosity, understanding, intuition and intimacy.
“Kitchen design,” Donahoe says, “is incredibly personal.”
It also requires an incredible sense of balance. Form and function have to harmonize, and maybe more than any other space in the home, the kitchen’s design needs to make a clear aesthetic statement without crowding out the voice of every other room.
“We really, really strive for making sure there’s a continuity to the flow of spaces,” Donahoe says, “whether it’s an open or closed floor plan, really being conscientious of how we’re spending the budget so that the kitchen is the unifier. Because it’s very rare that an architect and a designer will ever place the kitchen off the main tributary.”
To unify the unifier, Donahoe makes careful decisions about where to go big and where to pull back, where to complement the architecture and where to provide counterpoint, where to nod to the past and where to look toward the future.
The kitchen in one of their relatively recent local projects, a top-to-bottom renovation for a family of four in Franklin, Tennessee, ended up being a personal favorite, in part because it required Donahoe to flex his dynamic design muscles.
The home’s modern, open floor plan intersected with more classic, Italian-inspired architecture. It was “a juggernaut of a home,” Donahoe says, and the Bureau team was hired to touch every single space without touching the core architecture.
The challenge? Offering due deference to that architecture while bringing in the family’s personality, meeting their immediate needs, and aging well enough to grow with them through all the seasons to come.
Donahoe and Bureau shaped the kitchen design around two substantial islands that define the space while providing ample space to work and play, with bright honed Calacatta Gold Extra marble complementing quarter-sawn white oak. The islands sit alongside a large, arched window that looks out onto the pool (and feels like it could just as easily be looking out onto a Chianti courtyard).
The kitchen quickly became the most used space in their home, the family told Donahoe — a preferred hangout for their boys and a beautiful, comfortable place to prepare and enjoy meals.
“That kitchen still makes me feel like a warm embrace,” Donahoe says. “I mean, I don’t know if there’s a better way to explain it. It just feels like home.”
HOME IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
One surefire (but maybe a little contradictory) way to make a space feel like home, from Donahoe’s perspective — bringing in finishing touches, often small in size but always big in personality, from far-flung places.
He got a taste for travel early, growing up in Nebraska and getting toted around Europe with his German-born mom, Sigrid. Being exposed to French design, Italian design, Nordic design — it piqued an interest in interiors and a lifelong draw toward wandering and collecting.
This summer he headed to Norway, Sweden and Finland and came back to Nashville with new old treasures. Through the years, Donahoe has snatched up an array of intriguing statement pieces, from vintage Danish wood bowls to old mortar and pestles, cool little lamps and intriguing pieces of glassware.
“I’m a terrible collector,” he says, laughing, “because then I’ll decide that I wanna sell it to a client or I wanna use it in a project. I’m always acquiring and always looking.”
As Bureau gets toward the end of a design project, Donahoe tends to gift a finishing touch or two to the homeowners. Right now, they’re working on a contemporary home for a client who has a keen eye for Japanese design. So the team is preparing something special to imbue that innate, individual sense of home — a bowl that’s been repaired through the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, joining broken pieces with precious metal to reflect the beauty in imperfection.
“It’s something they’ll look back on,” Donahoe says. “And not only do they look back on us fondly, hopefully, for the kitchen design, they’re also looking at something that speaks to what makes them happy.”
Happiness, like kitchen design, is incredibly personal.
Matt Donahoe is the founder and principal designer of Bureau Interior Architecture | Design in Nashville. His approach balances comfort with elegance, designing spaces offering a personalized sense of home.
