Tudor & Colonial Revival Kitchens

Walk the Fabulous Forties in East Sacramento, the curving streets of St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill in San Francisco, the older blocks of Burlingame and Hillsborough, or the hills of Piedmont and Claremont in the East Bay, and the same decades are on every lot. Steeply gabled Tudor Revivals with half-timbering and leaded glass sit beside symmetrical Colonial Revivals with shuttered windows and a centred door, and both sit beside stucco Spanish and Mediterranean houses with arched openings and tile roofs. The East Sacramento homes went up mostly between the 1920s and the 1940s; the San Francisco residence parks were laid out somewhat earlier and filled in through the same years. The styles differ on the outside and share nearly everything within.

What they share is a plan written for a household with help. The front of the house — entry hall, living room, dining room, stair — was for the family and its guests. The back was for service: a kitchen with a range, a sink and a work table, a butler’s pantry between kitchen and dining room, often a maid’s room and a narrow back stair, and a porch for the ice box and the laundry. The kitchen was a workroom, not a living room, and it was finished accordingly: painted beadboard or plaster walls, a linoleum floor, and built-in cupboards of painted softwood with inset doors on exposed hinges.

That plan is the starting point for every kitchen in these houses today. Nobody wants the maid’s room, the pantry corridor, or the wall that keeps the cook from the dining room. Everybody wants the dining room, the leaded windows, the plaster cove, and the sense that the house is still the house. The work is to decide which walls come out, which rooms merge, and how the new cabinetry can be of the house without being a pastiche of it. The discipline that the National Park Service writes into its Standards for Rehabilitation — retain the historic character, do not add conjectural features that create a false sense of history, make new work compatible but distinguishable — is a fair description of good cabinetry in a 1930s house even where no review applies.

Inset construction sets the door and drawer front inside the face frame rather than over it, so what you see is a flat plane of painted wood interrupted by narrow, even reveals. It is the construction every original cupboard in these houses used, and it is the construction that reads as period at a glance because of those reveals: an overlay door hides the frame, an inset door shows it. The frame itself was almost always beaded on its inner edge — a small quarter-round milled into the stile and rail where they meet the door — which softens the shadow line and forgives small irregularities in the reveal. A plain-edged frame is a mid-century look; the bead is the pre-war one.

Door panels were simple. A flat panel, a shallow raised panel with a quiet bevel, or in Colonial Revival houses a beadboard panel that matches the wainscot. In Tudor Revival kitchens the same flat panel appears, sometimes with an arched top rail on a single pantry or hutch door to echo the arched front door. Elaborate raised panels with deep profiles belong to the 1980s version of these kitchens, not the 1930s one; keeping the panel quiet is the single most effective way to make new cabinetry look as though it belongs. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards put it more formally — replacement features should match the old in design, color, texture and, where possible, materials — and the lesson holds for new work as well.

Hardware does the rest. Exposed butt hinges with a ball or finial tip, cupboard latches, bin pulls on drawers and small knobs on doors, in brass, nickel or in Tudor houses a dark iron, are the period vocabulary. Concealed hinges are the alternative where an owner wants a cleaner face, and they work on an inset door with the right hinge, but the finished kitchen then depends on the reveals alone to read as period, and the reveals must be very good. Hardware choice is also the time to decide between a catch and a latch: a real cupboard latch holds a painted door shut without a magnet and is a detail worth keeping.

The finish is paint, and paint on cabinetry is a system rather than a colour. The AWI Factory Finishing standard, ANSI/AWI 0400, exists to provide standardized objective criteria for evaluating the performance and aesthetic attributes of factory-applied finishes, which is the plain statement that a shop-sprayed opaque finish is judged on how it performs as well as how it looks. In practice that means a catalyzed system applied in the shop, in controlled conditions, rather than brushed on site — the standard explicitly excludes jobsite finishing and brush-applied topcoats from its scope. The companion guide on finish systems covers the chemistry; for a painted inset kitchen the practical consequence is that colour matching to original trim is done on sample boards before anything is sprayed, and the cabinets arrive finished.

East Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties is the densest concentration inland: a grid of Tudor, Colonial and Spanish Revival houses between the 1920s and 1940s, large enough that a kitchen remodel there is a known type. The City of Sacramento’s 2007 Historic Properties Directory lists the city’s adopted historic districts, concentrated in the central city, and the Fabulous Forties is not among them — individual properties can still be listed, which is why the Preservation Director is the right call for a specific address, but the neighbourhood as a whole is not under district review. The Sacramento houses also sit in a hot, dry valley summer, which argues for stable painted panel construction and shop finishing rather than site-painted solid doors.

St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill in San Francisco are early-twentieth-century planned residence parks whose houses run the full revival range, with larger lots and larger kitchens than the Victorian flats elsewhere in the city. Their issues are San Francisco’s: narrow streets and delivery logistics, fog-belt humidity west of Twin Peaks, and the Article 10 question, which the historic district review spoke of this guide answers — interior alterations are exempt from a Certificate of Appropriateness under Section 1005(e), so the kitchen is the owner’s business and the facade is the city’s.

Burlingame and Hillsborough on the Peninsula, and Piedmont and the Claremont district in the East Bay, hold the same houses on a milder coastline where wood movement is low and the service wings were often fullest, so the pantry-and-maid’s-room merge yields a kitchen of a size a modern family actually wants. Across all of them the cabinetry is built the same way: in the shop, painted, inset, and scribed to plaster on site.