Bungalow

The most Chicago house there is. Here is how we revive its kitchen without erasing what makes it one.

Brick, low and broad, built around its woodwork. We design to the bungalow, not around it, across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

The house that built the city

There is no more Chicago house than the bungalow. Somewhere between 1910 and 1940, builders threw a belt of them around the city, tens of thousands of brick homes ringing the edges of town in what people still call the Bungalow Belt. You know one the second you see it. Low-pitched roof, broad and close to the ground. A face of warm Chicago common brick, often with a limestone or art-glass accent over the front windows. One and a half stories, the half tucked under that gentle roofline. Built solid, built to last, built for the families who were making this a city.

What makes a bungalow a bungalow is not really the outside, though. It is the way it was built around its woodwork. Step inside an original one and the house introduces itself in oak. Quarter-sawn oak trim running every doorway and window. Built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace, a built-in buffet in the dining room with leaded-glass uppers, picture rails, coffered or beamed ceilings in the better ones. This was an honest, craftsman idea of a home, where the millwork was the decoration and the wood was meant to be seen. A century later, that woodwork is very often still there, still beautiful, and it is the single most important thing to understand before anyone touches the kitchen.

What is usually going on in a bungalow kitchen

The bungalow kitchen is almost always the room the rest of the house was not. These were built small and closed off, a workspace at the back of the home, tucked behind the dining room and meant to be practical rather than admired. So the kitchen is where you tend to find the compromises a hundred years of living leaves behind.

A few patterns show up again and again. In a bungalow that has never been touched, you may still have the original woodwork carried into the kitchen, simple flat-panel or beadboard cabinetry in that same oak, often painted over at some point in a thick, gummy coat by an owner three or four families ago. In a bungalow that got a 1980s or 1990s remodel, you almost certainly have honey-oak or golden-oak raised-panel cabinets, the orange-toned wood that pegs the room to its decade the moment you walk in. And in either case the layout is usually tight, a galley or an L, with the original built-ins in the dining room still doing quiet, beautiful work just on the other side of the wall.

So the real question in a bungalow kitchen is never just "what color." It is a question of respect. The wood elsewhere in the house sets a standard, a warmth and a craftsmanship the kitchen is supposed to live up to. Whatever we do in here has to belong to that house. That is the whole brief.

How we'd approach it

A bungalow gives you two genuinely good directions, and which one is right depends entirely on what you have and what you love about the house.

If your wood is real and you love it: refinishing. This is the bungalow's home-field answer. If your kitchen cabinets are solid oak and your only complaint is that the tone has gone orange and tired, we can bring them back instead of covering them. Our Revive path takes the wood to a new stain entirely, and on a bungalow that usually means moving from that dated 1980s honey-orange toward something current and warm, a richer mid-brown, a soft natural, a grayed walnut tone that finally sits in conversation with the original trim instead of fighting it. If the color is already fine and the finish is just worn, our Refresh path restores the clear coat and brings the depth back without changing the color at all. Either way, you keep the real wood the house was built to show, and you honor the oak instead of erasing it. One honest note we always give bungalow owners: oak takes a stain beautifully and forgivingly, so it is a genuinely good candidate, but going lighter is harder than going darker, and we will tell you the truth about what tone is realistically reachable on your wood before you fall for a swatch.

If you want a painted kitchen: paint it, but paint it warm. Plenty of bungalow owners want the bright, fresh, painted look, and there is nothing wrong with that, even in a house full of woodwork. The trick is to let the paint and the original trim play off each other instead of clash. We steer bungalow kitchens away from the cool, stark, builder-white palette and toward warmer, softer whites and creams, putty and mushroom tones, a heritage sage or a muted blue-grey, colors with enough warmth to belong next to a hundred-year-old oak buffet. A factory-smooth, sprayed finish does the rest, taking your existing doors and boxes back to brand new without a brush line in sight. And if the cabinets you are painting are the original beadboard or flat-panel woodwork, even better, those simple period profiles paint up beautifully and keep the bungalow's quiet, honest character intact.

On door styles, if you are refacing. Should the boxes be good but the door style itself dated, refacing fits a bungalow naturally. A clean Shaker is the most at-home choice here, its square, honest, unfussy lines echo the craftsman woodwork the house already speaks in. A Mini Shaker works if you want something a touch more current without going modern. We would generally steer away from the fully frameless Flat Panel in a true bungalow, it reads against the architecture, though it can be lovely in a bungalow that has been opened up and modernized throughout.

Whatever the direction, the rule does not change. The kitchen has to look like it belongs to the rest of the house. In a bungalow, the house is always telling you what it wants. Our job is to listen.

Where Chicago's bungalows live

The Bungalow Belt sweeps across the edges of the city, but a few North Side neighborhoods hold the stock we work in most. Lincoln Square is bungalow country through and through, brick bungalows and greystones on quiet gridded streets, where families "stayed when they became parents" and now restore the kitchens of the homes they grew into. North Center runs the same playbook on some of the highest-income blocks on the North Side, bungalows and worker cottages getting opened up and brought back. And Logan Square holds the grandest of them all, the larger one-and-a-half and two-story brick bungalows along the Logan, Kedzie, and Humboldt Boulevards in the Boulevards Historic District, many with their original built-ins still in place. Beyond those, the classic Bungalow Belt runs out through Portage Park, Irving Park, and the broad Northwest and Southwest sides, block after block of the house that built Chicago.

We know these homes. We know what is usually behind the paint, what the original woodwork is worth, and how to make a kitchen feel like it always belonged.