The beach house kitchen will be our seventh kitchen project after redoing three of our own (this one’s our favorite), a 2014 showhouse, a 2016 spec house for a local builder (we loved that blue tile), and a teachers’ lounge we remodeled last year.
Even with prior experience, planning a kitchen still feels intimidating because of how many choices it requires: layout, storage, lighting, appliances, budget — the list goes on. Despite the stress, a thoughtful kitchen renovation is one of the most impactful updates you can make to a home. Now that we’re finally close to installing the beach house kitchen — lights hung, trim getting painted, and patched reclaimed pine floors — it’s exciting to share the process and the tools we used to plan it.
That photo shows the space as of last week. With lighting and trim largely in place and floors patched, the kitchen install can soon begin. It’s a long way from the demo stage when we first started planning the room last year:
We did the initial floor planning in Photoshop, which was helpful for concept but not precise enough for ordering cabinets. Since we chose Ikea cabinets, we used Ikea’s free 3D kitchen planning tool to map exact cabinet sizes and layouts. The tool helped us visualize configurations and pick precise components even if the interface isn’t perfect.
We experimented with several layouts in the planner. Ultimately we decided to skip upper cabinets in favor of open shelving and a lighter visual feel. The cabinets appeared heavy on that wall in the rendering, and because the house will be used as a weekly vacation rental we felt storage would still be adequate with the added cabinet run by the back door.
One limitation of the Ikea planner is that it won’t show non-Ikea products, so we couldn’t render our 40″ pink stove or the exact refrigerator we planned to buy. Renderings are inherently imperfect, but they gave us a solid sense of scale and arrangement once we added imagined sconces, pendants, and shelves.
Before placing the cabinet order we mocked the island and clearances on the floor with simple stand-ins to be sure circulation felt right. There’s no substitute for walking a space and seeing how the proportions work in real life.
Renderings also make it hard to judge finishes, so we created mood boards to lock in the overall palette and material decisions. Our final mood includes a vintage pink stove, a simple faucet, a stainless hood, sconces and island pendants, butcher-block countertops, and flat-front cabinet doors in a relaxed, casual mix that suits a beach house.
We were drawn to flat-front cabinets after finding inspiration photos that felt relaxed rather than overly modern. The uncluttered look paired with open shelving reinforces the easy, informal vibe we want for a vacation rental.
Butcher block became our choice for counters after seeing another designer’s kitchen using the same Ikea oak countertop. It’s affordable, warm, and repairable: sand and refinish if it gets worn in a rental. We ordered extra to make floating shelves so everything ties together visually.
We locked our cabinetry and counters in while Ikea was running a kitchen event sale, which saved us about 20% off the total. That discount made the cabinets, countertops, sink, soft-close hardware, and a pull-out trash drawer a very reasonable package.
Lighting was a major focus. We avoided recessed cans to keep the historic ceiling plane intact and instead relied on two island pendants, three sconces, and two dining lights to provide both task and ambient lighting. To ensure even illumination, we ruled out fixtures with solid shades so bulbs could cast light in all directions.
We tested many pendant and sconce options, mocking them into renderings to assess style and scale. Some fixtures looked great in isolation but felt too modern or too small when placed over the island. Mockups helped us eliminate choices that didn’t read well at the actual island scale.
In the end we chose 15″ wide clear-glass pendants so the bulbs can shine outward and the fixtures won’t feel heavy. The larger glass shades give good presence over the island while remaining airy.
We paired those with wire-mesh-shade sconces that allow light to pass through, giving the layered illumination we needed without solid shades. Seeing them lit in a showhouse reassured us that the fixtures would perform as intended.
We also mocked up the adjacent dining area to make sure the pendants there worked visually with the kitchen. Instead of one centered fixture, we opted for two smaller pendants so their sightlines don’t conflict from the living room and to keep the casual scale appropriate for the space.
Next steps include finishing a few remaining repairs, sanding and sealing the floors, and then starting the cabinet install. Once the Ikea boxes are out of our garage and everything is in place, we’ll share more photos and honest updates about how these materials hold up in a rental setting.
Psst — you can read about our past progress in the Beach House category.