When the client came to her with a request for ‘the ultimate outdoor kitchen’, Celia rose to the occasion and produced what is arguably Auckland’s finest alfresco cooking amenity – complete with a state-of-the-art wine shed.
CLIENT BRIEF
“My brief was to fulfil my client’s dream of having the ultimate outdoor kitchen, dining and entertainment area,” says Celia. “So we embarked on a journey to completely alter their backyard into a private, interactive and communal gathering space.”
DESIGN
Celia says that five dfferent cooking appliances were requested, which formed the basis for her design. “There’s a specialist wood-fired pizza oven that my client had seen on MasterChef and we imported from Australia, a conical- shaped, charcoal-burning BBQ, a gas hob and a wok burner integrated into the island and, finally, a ceramic, egg- shaped cooker, called a Kamado, that she imported from the Philippines.
“These appliances not only give my clients a variety of ways to cook their food, they also enable friends to congregate and socialise around di erent cooking sources – ideal for this alfresco- style kitchen.”
To help protect the kitchen from the ravages of the weather, the designer specified hardy, low-maintenance materials for the cabinetry.
This outdoor kitchen is a game changer, and is a testament to the huge amount of research the designer put in to overcome the issues of building a fully functioning kitchen in an outdoor environment. “It was a lot more complicated than you think,” she says. “At the end of the day, it worked out to be a comparable price to one of my indoor kitchens.”