Erik and Tone Haugen - My Framer Site

The Brief

Erik and Tone Haugen needed a flat that worked like a kitchen and a home. Erik is a chef — head of his own restaurant — and this is where the next dish gets tested before it's trusted to a paying table. Tone runs the rest of it: the guest list, the schedule, the version of the evening where everyone is fed and nobody is working. One bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen built to take the weight of both their working lives.

The brief was specific about sequence, not square footage. Counter space had to support real prep — boards, knives, ingredients laid out at once, not tucked into a galley. A magnetic knife rail, open shelving sized for stockpots rather than ornaments, a sink built for batch work rather than rinsing two plates — every fitting earns its place by what it lets Erik do, not by how it photographs.

The flat is small. The ambition for what happens in this room is not.

The Constraints

Access was the first constraint, and it shaped everything else. The entrance is also the flat's main thoroughfare — deliveries, guests, and Erik moving fast between the kitchen and the door all pass through the same few metres, so storage here had to work hard without narrowing the route through it.

Two full-height runs of cabinetry flank the entry rather than sitting along a single wall, because splitting the storage kept the centre of the room clear. The existing window above the door head was kept and extended down to the door itself, pulling daylight straight into a space that would otherwise have read as a dark transitional corridor.

Everything stored at the entrance was chosen by what gets used in passing — bowls, glassware, dry stock — rather than what gets used at length. Nothing here required a person to stop and search.

The Approach

The cabinetry is a single continuous run in a saturated yellow — chosen because a small flat with one main living volume needs one material decision doing the work, not several competing for attention. Everything else in the room — concrete, timber, white tile — is neutral specifically so the joinery can carry the colour without competition.

Storage is vertical and open wherever drying and access mattered more than concealment: timber shelving for glassware and crockery in regular use, closed yellow cabinetry below for everything that needed to be out of sight and out of the way. The split between open and closed storage was decided by how often Erik would reach for a thing, not by how the shelf looked with nothing on it.

The concrete ceiling and exposed services were left as found and worked into the lighting plan rather than disguised by it — surface-mounted task lighting fixed directly to the structure, doing the job without requiring a finished ceiling to hide behind.

The Work

The cooktop and prep counter sit on the same run as the sink, in that order, so a working sequence — wash, prep, cook — moves in one direction without doubling back. The pass-through to the living and dining area is wide enough for two people to move past each other holding plates, which matters every time Erik and Tone host.

Bathroom and kitchen share a plumbing wall, which kept the wet-room runs short and the renovation cost down — a decision made in the first week of design and never revisited, because every later layout option still worked best around it.

The bedroom was kept deliberately plain. Where the rest of the flat does the work of being lived in hard, the bedroom does the opposite job: timber, low light, nothing that asks for attention. It was the one room in the brief that wasn't trying to perform.

The Outcome

The renovation gave the Haugens a flat that runs the way Erik and Tone actually live — work in the kitchen, gather around it, retreat to a quiet bedroom at the end of the night. It is not a large flat, and it was never meant to read as one. It is meant to work the way a small, well-run kitchen works: nothing wasted, nothing in the wrong place, everything within reach.

It's where the flat exhales — the room Erik and Tone land in once the kitchen's done its work for the evening, and the one place in the brief that was allowed to just be comfortable.

"Tone says the test dishes that make it into the restaurant always start here first. I believe her — I've eaten most of them. The kitchen does exactly what we needed it to do, which is disappear into the background while the food and the people in front of us take over."

Erik and Tone Haugen

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