Cabinetry for Lake of the Pines Homes

Lake of the Pines is a gated community in the southern corner of Nevada County, reached from Highway 49 by Combie Road about midway between Auburn and Grass Valley. The mailing address says Auburn, the county says Nevada, and the community itself was planned as a single piece: a private lake in the middle, a golf course beside it, and residential lots arranged around both on the wooded foothill slopes. Unlike the towns on either side of it, it has no historic downtown and no Gold Rush housing. It has a lake, a course, a clubhouse, and several decades of houses built to look at the water.

The housing stock

The houses date mostly from the 1970s through the 2000s, with the earliest lakefront and course-side homes in the first group and the last infill lots built out in the most recent one. The early homes are single-story and split-level ranches with wood siding, low ceilings, and a deck on the view side; a fair number were built as weekend houses and were later enlarged for full-time living. The 1980s and 1990s added two-story homes with vaulted great rooms, and the 2000s brought larger custom houses on the remaining lots, often with the kitchen already open to the living area but fitted with the stock cabinetry of the year it was built.

What almost every one of these homes shares is a plan drawn around the view. The deck and the main windows face the lake or the fairway, and the kitchen, as a rule, was placed on the inside of the house, behind a wall or a pass-through, with a soffit over the uppers and a peninsula standing in for an island. The homes that were enlarged over the years often carry a kitchen that was never redesigned when the rest of the house was, so it is both older and smaller than the living space it now serves.

What that means for the cabinetry

The first move in most Lake of the Pines kitchens is to bring the kitchen to the view. A general contractor takes down the wall between the kitchen and the living room; we design the cabinetry for the room that results, which is almost always a longer space with an island where the peninsula used to be, a sink or a prep counter oriented toward the lake, and a full-height pantry and appliance run on the inside wall that absorbs the storage the old uppers held. Removing the soffit and running the new uppers to the ceiling recovers height in the lower single-story homes.

In the newer homes the layout usually stays and the cabinetry changes. Builder boxes come out and cabinetry made to measure goes in, frequently without moving plumbing or electrical, which keeps the project to a cabinetry scope. In the larger custom houses the brief often grows: a bar for the deck side, a mudroom run by the garage for lake gear, a butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room, and built-ins in the great room, all detailed to match the kitchen and all built in the same shop.

Stylistically, the community leans toward warm wood. Stained alder, knotty or clear, suits the pine-and-oak setting and the wood-sided older houses; white oak and walnut suit the newer ones; painted Shaker fronts suit kitchens that are being brightened for a lighter, more lakehouse feel. Whichever direction a household chooses, the construction is built for the house: scribed to walls that have settled on sloped lots, with drawer stacks sized to the way the household actually stores cookware and entertains when the family comes up for the weekend.

Jurisdiction and the association

Lake of the Pines is unincorporated Nevada County, so building permits come from the county’s building department, not from Auburn and not from Placer County. The Lake of the Pines Association reviews exterior work and changes visible from the lake, the course, or the street. A kitchen that stays inside the walls generally does not involve the association, but where a project also enlarges a window, adds a deck, or extends the footprint, that portion does. We identify the permit path at the first site visit and ask the homeowner to confirm the association’s current guidelines before the design is finalized, so the drawings describe a project that can actually be built.

Climate

The community sits in the lower foothills, with hot, dry summers and winters that bring rain, occasional snow, and long damp stretches under the pines. Lakefront kitchens that have been opened to the deck take a great deal of afternoon light and reflected glare off the water, so we favor finishes chosen for their resistance to yellowing and fading, and frame-and-panel doors that let solid-wood panels move through the swing from a dry August to a wet February. Homes used only on weekends sit unheated for stretches of the winter, which argues for finishes applied to every face of every part in our Rocklin finishing facility rather than sprayed on site.