Kitchens for Oakmont Village, Built to Age Gracefully

Oakmont Village sits at the eastern edge of Santa Rosa along Highway 12, the Sonoma Highway, where the city gives way to the Valley of the Moon. It is an active-adult community for residents 55 and over, laid out around its golf courses and backed by the open hills of Trione-Annadel State Park. Development began in the early 1960s and continued in phases into the 1990s, which is why a drive through the village passes through three decades of single-level house design.

The homes are almost all one story, which is the point. The earliest are compact ranch plans with low-pitched roofs, attached garages, and kitchens tucked at the back as a galley or a small U, closed off from the living room by a wall or a pass-through counter. Later phases grew larger and more open, with vaulted ceilings, a breakfast nook, and a kitchen that at least looks toward the family room. Many homes have been remodeled once already, often in the 1990s or 2000s, so the cabinetry we are replacing may be the second kitchen the house has had.

Footprints are modest by today’s standards. A typical Oakmont kitchen has one or two runs of base and upper cabinetry, a corner that wastes space, a range or cooktop on an exterior wall, and a refrigerator that was sized for a smaller model. The ceilings are mostly eight feet in the older sections. There is rarely room for a large island, but there is often room for a peninsula or a narrow work table, and almost always room to make what is there work far better.

Owners here tend to be planning for a kitchen that still works in fifteen years. That is a design brief we take seriously, and it shapes nearly every choice on this page.

We begin with a visit to measure the room and talk through how you use it: what you reach for daily, what you no longer want to bend for, whether the wall to the living room should stay. Design follows with drawings and physical samples of doors, finishes, and hardware you can try with your own hands. Once the drawings are approved, the cabinetry is built in our Rocklin workshop in Placer County and installed by our crew, with the house left clean and usable at the end of each day.

Projects start at $25,000. A kitchen that opens a wall, adds a peninsula, or relocates the sink lands above that, and the trade work for plumbing or electrical is added to the cabinetry. Because the boxes are built for your room, the whole process runs over several months from first drawing to final install, and we schedule installation so the kitchen is out of service for as short a stretch as possible.

Oakmont is part of our Sonoma County work. Across the city we also serve the rebuilt homes of Fountaingrove, and down the Sonoma Highway we build for Kenwood and Glen Ellen.