A Kitchen Shines Again Years After a Reno ‘Fail’

Michael and Gretchen Robbins consider themselves lucky. As a management consultant and a health and wellness coach with three kids, they moved into a nearly century-old home that they think provides the best of suburban-meets-city living.

“We can walk to the metro, but we also have a nicely sized yard, a detached garage, and big leafy trees,” Gretchen says. “Having previously lived in the very urban areas of New York City and Tokyo, we didn’t want to lose the ability to walk places, but we wanted a real house.”

Their historic address not only had an ideal location, but it also had an exemplary past: Though the Robbins are the third family to inhabit the four-bedroom structure, it has been well preserved. The Robbins did a renovation to the kitchen in 2012, about a year after they moved in, and hired Fowlkes Studio to overhaul their primary suite in 2017. But it wasn’t until about a decade after the first kitchen redo that Gretchen realized that first go-around had been “a failure.” So she called principal Catherine Fowlkes with the hope that she could fix it.

“We had a tiny kitchen compared to the scale of the house,” Gretchen adds. “We wanted something more functional and beautiful.” Keep scrolling to find out how the four-month project, which wrapped up in November 2021 (minus the refrigerator, which finally arrived last May), came to a close.

Location: Chevy Chase, Maryland

The before: “Knowing that the kitchen is the center of the house, we knew we wanted to renovate very soon after we moved in, and we did so in 2012,” Gretchen explains. “Although the finishes we chose were beautiful, the layout of the kitchen just never met our needs. It was the darkest, smallest room on the first floor, and it provided no barrier between cook and guests when entertaining. When my in-laws would come for dinner, for example, they were always standing right in the middle of the kitchen while I was trying to finish preparing the family meal. I love them, but I had to be like, ‘Get out!’ Also, with a large family, we just didn’t have enough storage space for food, my hundreds of cookbooks, and the plethora of cooking tools I collect.”