Victorian

A house this expressive can take a kitchen with real color. Here is how to do it without losing the millwork.

Queen Anne and Italianate, tall ceilings, ornate trim, made to be decorated. We design to the Victorian's character, across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

The house built to be decorated

The Victorian is the most expressive house in Chicago's building history. The label covers a family of styles from the 1870s into the early 1900s, the turreted and gabled Queen Anne, the tall and stately Italianate with its bracketed cornice and hooded windows, the frame Gothic with its steep peaks, and a few quieter cousins in between. What they share is a love of ornament. These were homes designed to be looked at and lived in with a little drama, decoration as a virtue, character on purpose.

And the decoration kept going once you stepped inside. Tall ceilings, often ten feet or more, give every room a sense of height and air. Deep baseboards, elaborate door and window casings, carved newel posts and turned balusters on the staircase, picture rails, plaster medallions, pocket doors, bay windows with built-in seats. The Victorian was built to carry color and pattern and ornament without flinching, which is exactly why it is the one Chicago style that genuinely invites a bolder kitchen. Where a bungalow asks for restraint, a Victorian can hold a deep, saturated color and look all the better for it. The one rule that never bends is the trim. The millwork is the soul of these houses, and whatever happens in the kitchen has to honor it.

What is usually going on in a Victorian kitchen

The original Victorian kitchen was a service room, plain and tucked at the back, sometimes with a butler's pantry between it and the dining room. Almost none survive intact, so a Victorian kitchen today is whatever its renovations made it, and Victorians have usually seen several.

A few situations recur. Many of these homes were carved into flats during the twentieth century and later restored to single-family, which means the kitchen may have been rebuilt entirely in a 1980s or 1990s remodel, the era of honey-oak and yellowed maple raised-panel. More often the kitchen is a step behind the rest of the house, with dated cabinetry ready for a fresh, period-sensitive look. And in the grand homes of Wicker Park or the historic stock of Oak Park, the standard is high, the kind of designer-led, showpiece kitchen these houses deserve, and exactly the work we are brought in to do.

The brief here is different from the more reserved Chicago styles. A Victorian can carry real color, and for a lot of homeowners that is what finally makes the room feel like it belongs to the house. Whether you lean toward a crisp white or something with more depth, the job is to choose a color that converses with the woodwork rather than fights it.

How we'd approach it

Painting, with room for real color. A factory-smooth, sprayed paint finish is usually the move in a Victorian, and the news here is that you can go bolder than in almost any other Chicago house if you want to. These rooms hold saturation. A deep forest or hunter green, a soft black, a moody navy, a warm oxblood, or a heritage blue-grey can be stunning on Victorian cabinetry, and against tall ceilings and ornate trim a saturated kitchen reads rich and intentional rather than overdone. A crisp white or a soft, lighter palette is just as at home here, and plenty of Victorians wear it beautifully. We love a two-tone too, a colored lower and a lighter upper, or a painted main kitchen with a contrasting island. The whole point is the marriage of color, the pairing that sits beautifully with your floors, your light, and crucially your woodwork. We bring a designer in on any sizable Victorian project precisely so the color is right in the room before a single coat goes on, whether that color is bold or barely there.

Honoring the trim is usually where we start. In a Victorian, the cabinets can take color, but the original millwork is often the best thing in the room. If your casings, baseboards, and built-ins are beautiful stained wood, we will usually suggest leaving them as wood and letting the painted cabinets play against them, since a richly stained surround and a painted kitchen is a classic Victorian pairing. We would rather not see irreplaceable original woodwork painted over to chase a trend, so we will always talk it through with you first. But if the trim has already been painted by a prior owner, or you simply want a different look, we are glad to make it happen. It is your home, and our job is to help you get it right.

On door styles and refinishing. A Shaker is the safe, period-friendly default and looks right under a saturated color. An inset Shaker, where the boxes allow, reads the most appropriate of all in a house this old. For something a little more tailored, an Artesia brings a custom feel with a beveled edge that flatters a refined room. If your Victorian kitchen has real wood you would rather keep as wood, refinishing is on the table too, our Revive path for a new, richer stain and our Refresh path to restore a finish that has only dulled. And if the door style itself is the thing dragging the room down, refacing keeps your good boxes and gives you brand-new fronts in a profile that suits the home.

Where Chicago's Victorians live

The Victorian turns up across the older city and inner suburbs, but a few areas are especially rich in it. Oak Park is a living museum of pre-Prairie housing, Queen Anne, Italianate, and frame Victorian stock from the 1880s and 1890s, in a village that takes its architecture seriously and knows what its homes are worth. Old Town, and especially the Old Town Triangle, holds some of the oldest housing in Chicago, Victorian frame houses and Greek Revival cottages on streets that predate the city grid, a few of them survivors of the 1871 fire. And Wicker Park is the Victorian showpiece of the near Northwest Side, the great brick and stone mansions along Hoyne, Pierce, and Caton in Queen Anne, Italianate, and Romanesque, many restored to single-family and now among the finest homes around. You will find more Victorian and Italianate stock threaded through Lincoln Park and the older boulevards as well.

We know these homes, the trim that makes them, and how to give a Victorian a kitchen with real color that still honors every inch of its woodwork.