Ardmore Library Tour Offers a Look Into Renovated Lower Merion Kitchens

A green kitchen, a do-it-yourself cottage-style kitchen with a contemporary feel, and the working, family-style kitchen of a nationally-syndicated Jewish food columnist and cookbook author were among the nine Lower Merion kitchens that were featured during "Recipe for Renovation,"  the Ardmore Library’s 6th Annual Kitchen Tour held Sunday afternoon.

The tour of renovated kitchens is a fundraiser for the Ardmore Library with the proceeds benefiting library operations, said Ann Kirschner, a library trustee who co-chairs the tour with Patricia Suplee, president of the Ardmore Library Board of Trustees. 

But, Kirschner said, “It’s not just a fundraiser. We see it as part of our educational mission.  We don’t have food in every kitchen because we don’t want it to overwhelm the educational aspect of the tour, teaching homeowners about their options when it comes to renovating kitchens.”

Some of the homes on the tour featured tastings, with crudité platters, cheese, fruit, vegetables and antipasto from DiBruno Brothers of the Ardmore Farmer’s Market and Philadelphia, tea sandwiches from Le Petit Chef of Radnor, and a risotto with summer squash cooked by chefs from the Viking Culinary Center in Bryn Mawr. All of the food was donated, Kirschner said.

Shortly after the self-guided tour began at 1 p.m., tour participants packed a 1950s stone colonial at 207 Landover Road in Bryn Mawr to view the home’s renovated “green” kitchen.

Brian Walters, a general contractor who runs Brian Walters Factotum Inc. Total Home Solution, owns the house on Landover Road but does not live in it.  Instead, he plans to renovate the entire home using eco-friendly materials and energy-efficient products to open up the home to builders, contractors and homeowners for free educational seminars.

“We’re trying to teach people how to be energy-efficient, protect the environment and buy local, buy American-made,” Walters said.  “We’re really trying to get that across to people that you can buy American-made, you just have to look a little harder.”

Walters is also “trying to encourage healthy living” with the “green” home.

“People are making air-tight houses with a lot of pollutants in them, so people are getting poisoned,” Walters said.

Cabinet knobs: Who knew?

The home’s green kitchen was finished in time for the kitchen tour, while the rest of the house was a work in progress.  Walters designed the kitchen with an architect friend who wished to remain anonymous. The cabinets were designed by Walters and A&C Kitchen and Bath, of Chester.

In order to promote a healthy air quality, the kitchen’s wall paint, cabinets and  flooring are all free of VOC (volatile organic compounds) and the house’s HVAC system will be set up to bring fresh air from outside into the home, Walters said.

The quartz countertops were made from 93 percent recycled materials, the cherry cabinets and white oak flooring were made from Pennsylvania-grown trees (saving on shipping and fuel), and the Viking appliances are American-made and Energy Star-rated, Walters said.

Natural light streamed into the kitchen from a large skylight, from sliding glass doors leading to a patio, and from windows. The kitchen also uses the most energy-efficient type of artificial lighting, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) lighting, along with low-voltage electrical lighting, Walters said.

The only thing missing from the kitchen were knobs on the cabinets.

“We don’t have knobs on the cabinets because Americans don’t make knobs,” and everything in the kitchen is American-made in order to stay consistent with the effort to buy local, Walters said.

Mary Rosenstein of Narberth said she came on the tour to get ideas for remodeling her home’s 50-year-old kitchen. “I like this kitchen a lot, very nice kitchen.  I love this quartz,” she said, referring to the countertops. “I thought it was granite.”

She was also impressed by the “green” theme. “I didn’t know you could do it,” Rosenstein said. “I think it’s great.”

Idea: Ikea

Also on the tour was the cottage-style, do-it-yourself kitchen designed by independent architect Karen Ramsey. Many tour participants were surprised to learn that the cozy, eclectic kitchen featured cabinets, countertops and a stove cooktop from Ikea.

“This is an Ikea kitchen,” Ramsey said. “I thought this is the way I can afford to do it, by doing it myself. It started out as 99 boxes delivered to my living room. It was a little daunting when I first saw them.”

Ramsey said she bought her house at 515 Owen Road in Wynnewood because she had always loved cottage-style homes. The outdated kitchen drove many other homebuyers away, but it was a draw for her.

“It looked like stepping back into 1955,” Ramsey said of the kitchen. “It attracted me because it needed a complete renovation. There wasn’t anything that could be saved from the original kitchen.”

Three and a half years ago, Ramsey opened up the space by tearing down a wall that once stood between the dining room and the kitchen and expanded the kitchen by stealing space from the dining room.

She removed the wall paper and painted the kitchen walls with earthy, warm beige tones.

Working by herself whenever she could find the time, Ramsey installed taupe-colored Ikea cabinets during a period that lasted two or three months, she said. The cabinets are made of a wood core with an enamel finish and came prefinished from Ikea.

Ramsey had originally considered installing granite countertops, but after learning that her entire home would need to be electrically rewired, she decided to go with pewter-colored Formica countertops, also by Ikea.

In the corner of the kitchen, near the home’s side entrance, Ramsey created a cozy, inviting sitting area featuring a window seat with throw pillows and a small table in front of it, a collection of vintage clocks standing in the corner of the windowsill, and a small wooden bookshelf filled with cookbooks standing beside the window seat.

A purple and green ceramic butter dish sitting on a small wall shelf, tiny framed black and white photos of people, a retro-looking toaster on the countertop, and a framed black-and-white architectural photograph used as a backsplash for the stove cooktop, leant an eclectic, artistic feel to the kitchen.

Jane Wurfel of Wynnewood said she came on the kitchen tour because she’s thinking of renovating her own kitchen in about a year. She took Ramsey’s card and planned on contacting her.

“I love it,” Wurfel said of Ramsey’s kitchen. “I like practical, reasonable, affordable, knowing I can have something that looks like more than its costs. I like how she uses all of her space and I love how she blends the old and the new.”

The Kosher Kitchen

In Merion Station, tour participants got to see the family-style kitchen of Ethel G. Hofman, a nationally-syndicated Jewish food columnist, cookbook author, working chef and culinary consultant.

Hofman’s has written six books. Her first was “Making Food Beautiful.” Her most popular cookbook has been “Everyday Cooking for the Jewish Home” and her latest, a memoir entitled, “Mackerel at Midnight: Growing Up Jewish on the Shetland Isles.”

The rich smell of risotto with summer squash being cooked by chefs from the Viking Culinary Center in Bryn Mawr could be detected as soon as tour participants walked in the home. Hofman said she and her husband Walter renovated their kitchen ten years ago.

“It’s a working kitchen,” Hofman said. “It’s a family style kitchen. I can make it formal with a nice cloth and china. ... Or I can make it informal with my grandkids around.”

Cherry cabinets by Krause Cabinetry, some of which featured glass inserts, lined the walls.  The cabinets were complemented by a Viking dishwasher and range, both in red. “The Viking Range, is of course, a treasure,” Hofman said.  “I like the gas top and the ovens are electric and self-cleaning.”

The range features a faucet over the stove which can be used to fill pots, a barbeque grill, a stainless steel grill which Hofman uses for making pancakes, an extra-large convection oven, and a second oven designed for baking.

The kitchen also offers conveniences such as a small central vacuum vents in the corners of the toekick (the recess at the bottom of a base cabinet), which can be turned on to suck up crumbs and dirt that gather on the floor, and a built-in cabinet pantry, which Krause Cabinetry designed with two folding doors in the center of the pantry that can be moved to reveal two more storage cabinets behind it.  The insides of the pantry doors also are lined with shelves.

The countertops are made of Caesarstone quartz which is heat resistant and comes from Israel, Hofman said.

The couple created an open floor plan by tearing down two walls, one between the dining room and kitchen and a second wall at the back of the kitchen where a sunroom once stood, Hofman said.  The sunroom is gone and the space was used to extend the kitchen. Fourteen people can be seated at her dining room table.

Hofman said her guests feel welcome to come into her kitchen from the dining room when she is cooking. “People are always helping,” she said. “It’s a kitchen for today’s living because we don’t live formally anymore,” Hofman said.

The tour also included six other renovated kitchens:

• A 1912 Dutch colonial home in Wynnewood
• A contemporary kitchen featuring a Carrera marble island in Wynnewood
• A black-and-white kitchen in Ardmore
• A 1896 Haverford home with a galley-style kitchen
• An expanded Merion Station kitchen with an island countertop made of “Desert Gold” granite and Art Noveau floral tiles from Argentina, incorporated in the stove hood and backsplash
• A Penn Valley house with double wall ovens, a six-burner stove, an oversized refrigerator and three freezer drawers concealed by the kitchen cabinetry

The Ardmore Library had sold about 150 tickets as of about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Kirshner said, but a final tally on ticket sales had not been taken.

Last year’s kitchen tour raised about $11,000, Kirschner said. 

Besides printing the tour booklets, the library has very few expenses for running the tour because volunteers, including library trustees, work in the homes on the tour and a graphic designer on the Ardmore Library Board, Martie Slawek of Mars Design in Ardmore, designs the tour booklet for free.