Real Estate

The Tiny Jenga Kitchen

The Fix

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

Renovating a 60-square-foot kitchen is like a game of balancing blocks: It takes skill, ingenuity and lots of patience. Brad Dickson for The New York Times

When Sue Yeoh bought her prewar one-bedroom in Forest Hills Gardens, a private enclave in central Queens, more than a decade ago, she had every intention of renovating the tiny, dark kitchen. But after investing in new appliances, gray cabinets and backsplash tile, she hit a roadblock.

“I never got a good feeling about the contractor, so I put a halt on the project,” she said. That was five years ago.

When Halina Hofmann, founder of Aspiro Renovations and Design, remodeled Sue Yeoh’s tiny kitchen, the first thing she did was remove the wall that enclosed it, creating more breathing room. Brad Dickson for The New York Times

Stacked in boxes, tile and cabinets sat in a corner of her living room until about a year ago, when she realized she couldn’t put off the project any longer. “The last renovation was done somewhere in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and was poorly designed and cheaply executed,” said Ms. Yeoh, 52, who works in corporate communications in the biopharmaceuticals industry. “There was a lot of laminate. Everything was brown.”

By the time she got around to shopping for another contractor, it looked even worse: The roughly 60-square-foot kitchen “was now shopworn and beyond repair,” Ms. Yeoh said. “Cabinet doors were actually falling off the hinges.”

Ms. Hofmann moved the sink closer to the window and chose compact appliances to maximize space. Brad Dickson for The New York Times

Besides that, she added, “I had enough of living in my home with boxes in the living room.”

Working with Halina Hofmann, the founder of Aspiro Renovations and Design in Manhattan, Ms. Yeoh started fresh, letting her new contractor take the lead.

One of Ms. Hofmann’s challenges was the shape of the kitchen, which “had a lot of weird angles, no storage space,” she said, and worse still, “outdated electrics” that couldn’t handle the demands of modern appliances. Also, “there was a steam pipe exposed in the corner by the window — it was a suffocating, enclosed mess.”

Once the kitchen was finished, Ms. Hofmann added cosmetic touches throughout the home, like staining the original wood flooring black. Brad Dickson for The New York Times

To make some breathing room, Ms. Hofmann removed a wall, creating an L-shaped design. She moved the sink closer to the kitchen window and chose compact appliances to maximize space. The slender Bosch refrigerator is counter depth, but “you can still fit a lot of wine, because it goes all the way up,” Ms. Hofmann joked.

By shaving a few inches off each appliance, the kitchen gained about a foot of counter space. (Counter depth appliances can be more expensive than standard depth ones.) Recessed lights and under-cabinet LED strips added light without diminishing headroom. Cabinets were stacked to the ceiling, tiered cutlery drawers cut down on wasted space and an awkward corner was fitted with a custom-built trash bin.

She also added sconces from Restoration Hardware in the living room, against a backdrop of wallpaper from Ellie Cashman Design. Brad Dickson for The New York Times

“We really struggled with giving Sue storage,” Ms. Hofmann said, because the basic appliances took up most of the kitchen’s under-cabinet space. To take advantage of what was left, “we gave her a drawer under the oven,” she said, “and gave her double drawers under the cooktop.”

To reduce waste and cut costs, Ms. Hofmann sifted through the boxes that had been sitting in the living room all those years, to see what could be salvaged. The cabinet interiors were put to good use — some of them to cover the exposed steam pipe — with new glossy white doors covering them. The backsplash tiles, however, were so old that they were falling apart, and after an unsuccessful attempt to save them, she substituted subway tile.

Ms. Hofmann, who said she doesn’t ever “throw away anything that can be reused or repurposed,” was also able to make a contribution of her own: A white oak door left over from another job was transformed into open shelving.

“Halina redesigned the tiny kitchen footprint with Jenga-like efficiency,” said Ms. Yeoh, who was able to move three sets of china and her crystal collection into her new kitchen cabinets, emptying two alcoves that flank the living room fireplace.

And it didn’t hurt that Ms. Hofmann lived just a few blocks away, making it easy for her to pop in and offer extra hand-holding throughout the process. “She really took a lot of the anxiety out of the process,” Ms. Yeoh said. “My general contractor is a unicorn.”

Once the kitchen was complete, she continued, “we added cosmetic touches throughout the rest of the apartment, staining the original wood flooring black, replacing hollow with solid wood doors in the hallway, adding sconces from Restoration Hardware and dark floral wallpaper from Ellie Cashman Design — all on budget and on time.”

The cost: $45,000, not including materials.

“It was process I was dreading at first,” Ms. Yeoh said, recalling the frustration she felt over her false start. But “I ended up saying, ‘I want to do this again. What’s my next project?’”