Our #ProjectLakelife Kitchen - My Favorite Appliances Part 2

Hi again from Lake Cherokee where I sit enjoying the beautiful view of the sunlight reflecting off the water. But behind me sits my pitiful kitchen that is half torn up waiting for it’s moment to shine like the sun.

I have clients battling the appliance waiting game as they are getting year long lead times from many of the heavy hitters in the luxury appliance realm. In my case, I was lucky when the vendor I selected had anticipated a growing demand and had ample stock sitting in their New Jersey warehouse. So my appliances are all here in Richmond waiting on my kitchen to be completed. In my case, it’s my cabinets that are holding up the process. But I’m pretty sure it will be worth the wait! And my trip to KBIS in Orlando a few weeks ago reassured me that I made the right decision about my appliances.

Enjoying the SKS booth at KBIS with my design besties, Jana Donohoe and Sarah Wilson.

In 2019, I had the pleasure of traveling to Napa, California with the Designhounds to tour the Signature Kitchen Suite Experience & Design Center. Check out my blog post about this amazing trip HERE and learn more about the beautiful SKS Napa EDC. This year at KBIS, Signature Kitchen Suite continued it’s streak of introducing ground breaking luxury appliances with its 48” French Door built-in refrigerator which won the Best of KBIS Award.

The refrigerator boasts two freezer drawers, a convertible drawer and a drawer housing the dual icemaker. The functional and innovative convertible drawer offers five preset temperatures ranging from 41⁰ F to -6⁰ F allows for precise food preservation across five temperature settings: chilled wine, fridge/deli, meats and seafood, beverage, or drop the temperature all the way down to make it a freezer. The dual icemaker provides options for both frustum ice and the slow-melting, spherical Craft Ice elevate beverages of all kinds. This 48” model will not hit the market until the end of 2022, so I’ll be installing the 36” version which is just fine for our empty nester lifestyle. But, this 48” version would have been amazing when I had two kids at home, both athletes.

The star of the SKS line in my mind is still the 48” Dual Fuel Pro Range and I’m excited to say that this beauty will be the star of my new kitchen!

I have clients that go back and forth between gas and induction when we’re designing kitchens and it has become a contentious debate. But with the SKS Pro Range, you can have both! There are four gas burners and a two zone induction cooking area. But the third zone on this cooktop is the one that has me the most excited … the sous vide! My husband and I discovered sous vide about 6 years ago when we had some of the best steaks prepared in a sous vide in a Nashville restaurant. Until recently, the only means of cooking sous vide (latin for “under vacuum”) was with a portable wand that would heat and circulate the water to the desired temp. We started experimenting on all kinds of things and quickly became obsessed. We went on to send sous vide wands to our whole family as Christmas presents. Now we’ll have the sous vide built into the top of this amazing range.

In addition to all of the capabilities this range presents on top, it also boasts an 18” steam combi-oven and a full size convection oven on the bottom. I can’t wait to incorporate this steam oven into our repertoire! My husband became even more sold on the 48” Pro Range when we enjoyed a virtual dinner party via Zoom during he pandemic with SKS Executive Chef Nick Ritchie. I’ve had the pleasure of watching Nick cook both at the SKS Napa EDC and at KBIS. You should check out some of his cooking demos and the Pro Range in action on the SKS YouTube channel.

So hopefully I’ll be able to bring home my refrigerator, this magnificent pro range, the SKS power steam dishwasher and the SKS microwave drawer soon! I’m excited to see this kitchen transformed!

This rendering shows my plans for the new kitchen. I can’t wait to see my vision become reality!

So, I’ll end with one more cool thing about sous vide. You can make some killer craft cocktails in it! Here is a fabulous recipe, courtesy of SKS, for a Carmen Miranda cocktail.

How To Work With Color In Your Living Spaces

We recently finished a great project at a lakeside home in Powhatan, Virginia for a family of eight. This was such a fun one to work on because my clients embrace vibrant interiors as much as I do. When they purchased this home by the lake, they decided that none of their more formal European furniture from their previous home worked well, so they needed to start from scratch. We decided to set the tone for the entire house as soon as you step into the front door with this bold wallpaper in the foyer.

Most of our clients opt for more neutral upholstery pieces in their living rooms because they’re afraid to commit to a bold color. But In this case, we started our design process with the selection of a gorgeous teal leather tufted sofa. We then found the beautiful hand knotted rug that pulled in so many other fun colors to work with.

The key to working with bold colors in a living space is to balance it with softer neutral tones. In this case, we kept the walls light and brought in the ivory chairs and marble accent tables.

To further balance the scale of these soaring ceilings, we added the custom cabinetry at the back of the room. The bases of these cabinets were specially designed for the furry members of their family.

With a family of eight, my clients decided to finish the basement to create more living space for their large family. We were able to create two distinct living areas, a small kitchen and dining space, a second master suite with a full bath and two walk-in closets, a playroom and a full size pool bath out of the almost 2700 square feet of basement space.

The walk-out basement has a fair amount of natural light due to large windows and sliding doors, but that light is shaded from balconies at the floor above. So, we kept the walls light and brought the color in through the furnishings again. The sofas took on the bold purple hues of the vibrant rug with a heavy duty outdoor fabric. And I love the fabric that we used on the outsides of the pull-up chairs.

I’ll never forget when the electrician called me very confused about my installation instructions for the tealight chandelier in the corner. He couldn’t figure out how anyone would be able to sit on the bench under it. I then explained that he needed to think of it as a sculpture in the corner of the room. The light then went on in his head . . . and eventually in the corner.

This large original artwork that we specified through one of my art dealers was the perfect showstopper for this space!

The other showstopper in this room is the travertine tile fireplace with the silver leaf finish. The tile added the needed texture and bit of metallic sheen that helped to anchor the room and create a focal point.

Another area of this basement includes a family room for playing games and watching TV. We used a commercial grade teal chenille on the sectional to withstand the wear and tear of this family.

We camouflaged a weight bearing beam at the ceiling with a curved soffit and took the opportunity to create a unique lighting effect with LED tape lighting along the perimeter. And I always love a painted ceiling, so we painted this curved ceiling a soft blue.

So like everything in life, balance is the key when incorporating color into your living spaces. You need to balance bold colors with softer neutrals to keep from overwhelming a space. Your eye needs a place to rest so that the color doesn’t all blend together and overwhelm the room.

If you love color, but you’re just too afraid to take the plunge on your own, my biggest advice is to hire a professional to help you. There is definitely an art to mastering colorful interiors and the rewards are certainly worth the investment!

Chilling With Signature Kitchen Suite

So why Napa? Why did Signature Kitchen Suite develop their Experience & Design Center there? Perhaps it’s their dedication to the vintner’s way of life and the Technicurean’s passion for great wine. It is said that the Paris Tasting of 1976 put Napa Valley winemakers on the map. In a blind tasting, two American wines, a Chateau Montelena Chardonnay and a Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon fbeat out the best wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. Since then, Napa Valley wineries have grown from just over a dozen to several hundred today, and along with the vineyards grew Americans’ love and appreciation of the wine culture.

This year at KBIS, the National Kitchen and Bath Association launched the inaugural “30s Choice Award.” The NKBA honors an outstanding group of young professionals as part of its Thirty Under 30 program. At KBIS, the incoming class was tasked with scouring the KBIS show floor searching for the most innovative products, ideas, and technologies in 10 categories which are selected as the NKBA 30s Choice Awards. The new SKS integrated wine column refrigerators were singled out for this prestigious award in the Smart Home Integration / Wi-Fi Enabled Product category..

I love this shot of the dining room at the Signature Kitchen Suite Experience and Design Center with the wall of integrated wine columns. Who wouldn’t want this in their dining room? They surprised us all in this room with a cupcake party to end our second evening there.

Unique to the brand’s new integrated wine column refrigerator series is Wine Cave™ technology, designed for precise wine preservation, inspired by the traditional, historic old-world caves of wineries, located in Napa Valley, Calif. Carefully tailored to mimic these ideal environments, the exclusive Wine Cave design significantly reduces vibration – a primary impediment to wine preservation, which causes chemical imbalances affecting the quality, flavors, aromas and texture – as well as minimizes temperature fluctuations, limits light exposure and locks in humidity.

The 24” wide integrated wine column holds up to 113 bottles and can accommodate up to three different temperature zones for reds, whites and sparkling wines.

SKS has also launched the True Sommelier™ app that helps wine collectors manage their personal collections, including making pairing suggestions, remembering favorites,and suggesting alternatives when your favorite is unavailable.. Being in Napa, we certainly couldn’t overlook the importance of wine in our culinary culture. Vineyards have become more plentiful throughout the US. We enjoy really nice ones throughout Virginia, but nothing compares to the grapes grown in Napa Valley! For the true wine lovers and collectors, it’s important to have the very best equipment to protect the wines they’ve collected from favorite local vineyards or their travels.

The 18”wide integrated wine column holds up to 71 bottles and offers two temperature zones.

If you’re not a wine collector or just don’t keep your wine around long before drinking it (yours truly), SKS has developed the perfect French door refrigerator for you. The two bottom drawers have the ability to set the temperatures to serve as either a freezer or a wine drawer!

Signature Kitchen Suite has put the same innovative “True to Food” philosophy into action with their refrigerators. They offer “Speed Freeze & Speed Chill”. The faster something freezes, the smaller the ice crystals — meaning less disruption to your food. Freezing fresh food as quickly as possible, Speed Freeze helps retain original flavors, vitamins, nutritional value, and appearance. Speed Chill uses the same innovative thinking in the refrigerator, quickly bringing the temperature back to optimum level after the door is opened for an extended time.

And talk about a smart appliance, the SKS freezers offer Adaptive Defrost. Meet the freezer that gets to know you. Adaptive Defrost measures the number of times you open the door and ambient temperature to select the best time to defrost. When you are away, it will defrost less often, saving energy and reducing freezer burn.

As the love for excellent food grows, so grows the need for space. Fortunately, the Signature Kitchen Suite 30-inch Integrated Column Refrigerator is brilliantly engineered to provide the industry’s largest capacity column, featuring 18.0 cubic feet of storage capacity. Food deserves to stay fresh as long as possible through optimum temperature. Ingenious features like a linear compressor and engineered all-metal interior help to minimize temperature fluctuations to maintain food freshness — brilliantly engineered to help you do your part in the battle against food waste.

One of the coolest features I discovered with these refrigerators and freezers is the integration of cleverly hidden True-Illumination™ Lighting. The LED lighting is within each shelf and moves with the shelves which ensures that the spotlight stays focused on the food, not shining in your eyes.

Time to wine down! After a great few days of learning and marveling at all of the ingenious features of the SKS line of appliances, we were ready to relax a little and of course, enjoy more wine! We ended one evening here at Zach’s Lounge, named for SKS General Manager, Zach Elkin.

We had a wonderful time connecting with each other, making new friends both among the designers and the SKS team. Everyone from Signature Kitchen Suite was so gracious, knowledgeable and passionate about their brand. I’m very thankful for the opportunity to visit their absolutely stunning Experience and Design Center.

And a big thank you goes to the wonderful ladies of who put together these amazing opportunities! Your hard work and dedication to providing terrific educational and brand partnership opportunities is greatly appreciated!

Veronika Eagleson, Flo Von Pelet and Sarah Harman

Now I’m off to open a bottle of Cabernet with all of this talk of wine!

This post is sponsored by Signature Kitchen Suites, as they paid for my trip with the Modenus Designhounds to Napa. All opinions and commentary are my own.

Meet Signature Kitchen Suite - The New Luxury Appliance Brand Raising The Bar!

This has been an eventful Spring with lots of great travel. I’ve recently returned from Napa, California where I visited the Signature Kitchen Suite Experience & Design Center with the Modenus Designhounds.

What an incredible opportunity this was travelling with an influential and talented group of designers and meeting all the brilliant folks behind this impressive new luxury appliance brand. I’ve followed this brand’s rapid rise since first discovering them at the 2017 Orlando KBIS (Kitchen & Bath Industry) show. Signature Kitchen Suite is the fresh built-in kitchen appliances luxury from global home appliance leader LG Electronics, and is committed to innovative thinking, purposeful design, and leading-edge precision.. They have developed innovative and technologically advanced appliances for their ideal consumer … the Technicureans™

This year Signature Kitchen Suite earned multiple honors at KBIS, led by the highly-coveted Gold “Best of KBIS” Award for its industry-first pro range with built-in sous vide modality. This pro-range is the first on the market with built-in sous vide, induction, and gas – all on the cooktop, delivering the ultimate in precision cooking. Once limited to working pros, sous vide is a cooking technique utilizing precise temperature control to deliver consistent, restaurant-quality results. Now, with the industry’s first built-in sous vide range, home chefs can achieve professional-level results capturing their food’s full, true flavor. My husband and I have cooked for several years with a sous vide wand and have become huge proponents of the cooking method. So much so that this past Christmas, everyone in the family got a sous vide wand from us as a gift! Instead of using the wand in a large vat of water taking up space on my countertop, I would love to have the SKS 48” Pro Range with sous vide built right in it! And if you don’t have room for the 48” Pro-Range, consider their award winning 36” range. Innovations like designing the largest capacity steam-assist convection oven have led the SKS 36-inch Dual-Fuel Pro Range to be recognized by two of the industry’s most prestigious award shows: The 2018 IDEA Finalist Award and the highly coveted 2018 Red Dot “Best of the Best” Award – chosen by a global jury of 39 design experts.

While visiting their beautiful new Experience & Design Center, we had a wonderful dinner with Moone Tsai winery. This was our first chance to actually taste the magic of the built-in sous vide with perfectly prepared filet mignon with foie gras. The entire meal was to-die-for and the wines were perfect! I loved the Cabernet Sauvignon Cor Leonis!

The 23,000-square-foot facility’s centerpiece is the high-performance Signature Kitchen Suite-equipped demonstration kitchen, which is one of 20-plus vignettes. On the second day of our visit, we witnessed the 48” Pro Range in action with master chef A.J. Schaller.

With designer Christy Davis’s help, she made a beautiful leek salad with eggs poached in the sous vide. Then John “Nick” Nichols jumped in to assist AJ with the amazing lamb we would later have as the main course for lunch. And last, but certainly not least, Rebecca Reynolds helped AJ with a beautiful creme brulee.

Seriously … look how beautiful these lamb chops were! And did I mention that the 48” Pro Range also has a gas cooktop AND an induction cooktop all on one range? It also has a 30” convection oven along with an 18” steam assist oven. It really does offer the best of all worlds in one range.

Signature Kitchen Suite has developed a “True to Food” philosophy wholly embodied by their brand and dedication to the Technicurean lifestyle. Check out their True to Food films about the importance of knowing where your food comes from and how it is sourced.

In the first episode of our True to food™ Films, Mark Bittman shows us why being on a first name basis with your local butcher can actually make everything taste better. Learn how to make the best steak using sous vide and finishing it with a nice crust.

Of course, we did manage to have a little fun while we were there! We spent an afternoon at the Culinary Institute of America at Copia enjoying a fabulous lunch and touring The Chuck Williams Culinary Arts Museum. What a great display of beautiful kitchen gadgets and wares!

We then enjoyed a fabulous lunch with you guessed it … more wine!

So as I sit here putting together this amazing experience in words and photos, lamb chops are currently cooking in my sous vide and it’s time for me to get to the potatoes. You’ll have to come back to learn more about Signature Kitchen Suite’s award winning wine columns and refrigerators. I have so much more to share with you! But for now .. . .

This post is sponsored by Signature Kitchen Suites, as they paid for my trip with the Modenus Designhounds to Napa. All opinions and commentary are my own.