A Custom Kitchen Shop for Campbell’s Ranch Houses and Infill

PineWood Cabinets is a design-build cabinetry shop for Campbell homeowners who want a kitchen made for their specific house rather than assembled from a catalog. Cabinetry is designed, built, and finished in our Rocklin workshop in Placer County, and our crews travel to Campbell to measure, deliver, and install it.

Campbell still calls itself the Orchard City, and the name explains the housing. The orchards that once surrounded the drying yards and canneries were subdivided after the war, and the result is a city of single-story ranch houses from the 1950s and 1960s laid out on quiet grids west of Winchester Boulevard and out toward San Tomas Expressway. Most of those houses were built with a galley or L-shaped kitchen walled off from the living spaces, a layout that made sense when the kitchen was a workroom and does not make sense now.

Downtown is the other Campbell. East Campbell Avenue, with the water tower at one end, is a walkable main street, and the blocks around it hold some of the oldest houses in the city alongside new townhomes and condominiums. The Pruneyard, the shopping center and office towers just east of downtown, has condominiums and townhouses clustered around it, and the Hamilton Avenue corridor mixes original ranch homes with infill built in the last two decades. These newer homes have open plans and taller ceilings, and their kitchens are the center of the house from day one.

Between those two there is a thinner layer of mid-century houses with flat or low-pitched roofs, open beams, and glass to the yard, built in the same years and spirit as the Eichler tracts elsewhere in the valley. They want a different vocabulary: flat doors, frameless boxes, uppers that stop below the beam line, and nothing that competes with the glass.

Permits are simple here. The City of Campbell issues building permits for homes inside its limits, which covers almost every address on this page. Swapping cabinetry while leaving the sink and range in place is a light touch; opening the wall between the kitchen and family room, or moving plumbing to put a sink in an island, is a remodel the city reviews. We tell you at the first meeting which of those your project is.

The climate is kind to wood. Campbell sits in the Santa Clara Valley with warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters, far from coastal fog and far from mountain snow. Seasonal movement is low, and the main thing we design around is sun: a ranch house with a west-facing slider or a kitchen window over the sink will put years of afternoon light on one run of cabinets, and the species and finish on that wall are chosen with that in mind.

Stock cabinetry is sized for a room that does not exist in Campbell. The ranch house has a window over the sink that sits lower than any stock upper allows, a soffit that someone added in 1975, and a new opening to the family room that leaves an odd return on one side. The mid-century house has beams where a tall pantry wants to go. The downtown townhome has ceilings that stock boxes stop two feet short of. Custom cabinetry is how you answer the house instead of filling gaps with trim.

In practice that means an island sized to the actual clearances of a ranch living space, a pantry run that lands exactly on the beam in a mid-century house, and full-height storage in a small-footprint condominium. The same shop builds the mudroom bench, the home-office wall, and the media built-in to the same standard.

Campbell sits between two of our West Valley markets. We also serve Los Gatos and Saratoga up against the hills, the Willow Glen and Almaden neighborhoods of San Jose to the east, and the rest of the peninsula on our Silicon Valley page.