For more than a quarter of a century, Sticks and Stones has been helping island residents to realise their kitchen dreams.
The Middle Road, Paget business provides and installs top quality semi-custom and custom cabinets and countertops to help create the ultimate medium to high-end kitchen – and providing less expensive ready-to-assemble products as well.
Chris Hardy, the general manager at Sticks and Stones, said 60 per cent of its business is generated by architects and designers, with the remaining 40 per cent comprising homeowner walk-ins.
While architects and designers tend to move the needle when it comes to new design elements – outdoor kitchens are becoming more popular – individual homeowners arrive at Sticks and Stones with ideas they have seen on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, but also need more assistance.
That involves listening to a client, who may be embarking on a kitchen renovation project for the first time, and providing information about the options available.
Mr Hardy said: “I feel like people are happy with that approach because they learn a lot more. Once you have more of an understanding, it also helps us be on the same page when we’re suggesting things.”
Part of the puzzle is understanding how people use their kitchen.
Mr Hardy said: “There’s different theories around how to design or use or work in a kitchen. The zone method is one method that I’ve used before where you kind of say, ‘This is my clean-up zone, this is my cold refrigeration zone, this is my storage zone, this is my prep zone.’ That works quite well.
“However, it really needs to work with your personality. So, if that’s not really the way that you work in the kitchen, if you’re used to having everything over here or everything over there, then we’ll obviously try and do that.”
Less is more
Among homeowners, Mr Hardy said there is a growing trend towards a clean, minimalist look.
“Everybody’s looking for a painted white cabinet.”
Accent cabinets in navy blue or sage green are also popular.
Minimalism can assist in helping to make the most of kitchen space, whatever its size, as clients de-clutter by trying to find homes for things, thereby keeping kitchen countertops free as much as possible.
Sticks and Stones assesses how the customer works in their kitchen based on what they already have.
“A lot of times people have an accumulation of things over the years,” Mr Hardy said.
“When you sit back and start going through, you realise, ‘Hey, I don’t use this that often,’ and you start to naturally minimise your own items, which makes it easier for design.
“We usually try to design a home for everything if we can, if it’s possible, and when we can’t fit something into a cabinet, we’ll try and put it on an open shelf.”
Mr Hardy added: “It’s easy to put something on a shelf and you can organise it by category. So, you know, dishes, plates, whatever you have.
“More people are trending towards the open cabinet or open shelf idea. When you don’t have a lot of base (cupboard) space, the walls are what we look at next. So, you can go up as opposed to going around.”
Modern trends
Innovations in organisational storage are assisting homeowners to get the most out of their space. That can include vertical pullout drawers for storing cutlery and other kitchen items, which tend to be narrower than traditional cutlery drawers, as well as pullout shelves to make the most of blind corner cabinets, pullout trash cabinets and roll-out shelving.
Mr Hardy said: “These all sound like basic concepts, but when you haven’t had this in your kitchen and then you do, it just really changes the way that you think about the kitchen, and it changes the way that you and your family use the kitchen.
“So, those roll-out trays, we use them a lot for what I call ‘aging in place’. As you get older, you want things to come to you as opposed to going to the things.”
Mr Hardy said he fields more questions about countertops than any other kitchen design element.
Natural materials such as marble and granite have traditionally been customer favourites due to their pleasing appearance.
However, as an alternative, manufacturers have created “engineered quartz”, which involves taking natural quartz – a hard mineral that is naturally occurring in granite and marble – and crushing it and mixing it with man-made epoxy resins.
Mr Hardy said: “They artificially create these natural-looking patterns. So, it gives you the feel of a marble, it gives you the feel of a granite, but it gives you all the durability properties of a man-made product, where you don’t have to seal it, you don’t need to worry about red wine seeping into your countertops.
“It’s great if you have kids, grandkids, tenants, where you’re really looking to put something down that looks nice aesthetically, but also will last.”
He added: “For countertops, everybody’s doing quartz, quartz, quartz, quartz. We still do get calls for natural stones. They are absolutely beautiful, they’re gorgeous. A lot of times we’ll do it in spaces like around fireplaces, but not necessarily worktops.”
Also popular, Mr Hardy said, is sintered stone, a new man-made product that is made of a variety of recycled materials including bits of glass, natural stone and quartz, as well as other minerals, all compressed into a countertop slab, that has the feel of a tile.
The lead time for a semi-custom cabinet order takes eight to ten weeks to produce from the time that an order is placed. Figure on another three weeks for shipping.
Ready-to-assemble orders normally arrive on-island within three to four weeks.
Sticks and Stones is on Middle Road, Paget, just west of the traffic lights.
