Marci and Lou Palatella are in love with
all things Italian. Lou’s heritage stems from Italy,
he’s traveled there frequently, and it was while he was
showing off the island of Sardinia to Marci that they
became engaged. Setting up housekeeping in Italy wasn’t
practical (it was a vacation, after all), so they did the
next best thing: They faxed in a bid on a
Mediterranean-style house they’d seen just outside San
Francisco. The two returned to California to marry and
create their own villa-like haven reminiscent of Sardinia.
Marci, president of a wine and spirits
export company, and Lou, a liquor company executive, share
a knowledge and appreciation of wines. “Food and wine
are a big part of our lives,” Marci says, “and we
spend lots of time in the kitchen; for us it’s the
heartbeat of the house. We needed a place that would feel
good, a place we’d enjoy being in.”
But the kitchen in their dream home
wasn’t prepared to fill all the couple’s desires.
Built in the 1920s, the house had been drastically
remodeled in the 1970s, resulting in a too-small kitchen
with a dropped ceiling, dark cabinets, and fluorescent
lighting. Not only was the area cut off from the rest of
the house, but the previous owners had installed an
enormous oak-and-mirror-trimmed bar that engulfed most of
the space.
Marci turned to the person who had always
given her design advice: her best friend of 20 years,
designer Linda Martini. “Linda and I went in and sat on
the floor in the kitchen for three hours,” Marci says of
an early visit to the house. By the third hour, it became
evident that a Band-Aid approach wasn’t going to work;
everything would have to be torn out, and they would start
anew.
They increased the square footage of the
kitchen almost threefold by eliminating an awkwardly
shaped TV room that neighbored the old kitchen. Then they
had the ceiling returned to its original height and
everything ripped out—from the cabinetry down to the
mammoth bar. The only remnants of the kitchen as Marci and
Lou had found it were the arched window looking out into
the side yard, the dark-stained wood-and-tile floor, and
the dining area’s six-over-six windows and French doors.
The team tackled its now-blank canvas by
starting with the floor. “Both the wood and the tiles of
the original floor had been stained—it was dark and
gloomy,” recalls Martini. Sandblasting transformed the
dark coverings into blonde wood and light terra-cotta
tiles.
They agreed on cherry for the
cabinets—it would provide warmth and richness—but
Martini and Marci wanted to add another texture to the
cabinetry. “I wanted to add a metal to the textural mix,
and I wanted some brightness and sparkle.” An architect
friend of the contractor came up with the mesh-front idea
when he came across the material in a hardware store.
The copper mesh cabinetry fronts
complement the copper-detailed range hood. This shining
crown to the kitchen’s commercial-style range is a
scaled-down version of a range hood Marci and Lou had long
admired at one of their favorite local eateries. The
copper’s shine contrasts distinctively with the matte
finish of the stainless-steel hood.
To replicate Sardinian architecture as
best they could, Marci and Lou incorporated many typical
Mediterranean building materials. “You see [over there]
these wonderful mixtures of brick and wood and slate and
copper,” says Marci. Slate plays a primary role in the
textural scheme of their kitchen—as countertops and on
the backsplash. These rough-texture square tiles, ranging
from red-brown to gray-green, were used in lieu of more
common kitchen counter surfacing materials. “Marci
wanted an earthier feel,” Martini says. “The slate was
a definite moodmaker. From the moment it was installed,
the room took on a richness.”
Integral to the overall feeling of the
kitchen/dining area are the stucco-imitating walls. The
walls were painted and ragged for texture with what
Martini refers to as a “washed-out mustard” color. The
finishing touch—painted vegetable garlands—was applied
by the deft hand of local artist Kate McIntyre, whose work
the Palatellas had admired at a San Francisco restaurant.
The most important element of the
kitchen’s work plan: the island. It allows ample space
for one, two, or more cooks. “Everybody likes to hang
out in our kitchen,” Marci laughs. “We find we can’t
really get rid of anybody!” And as Lou, a San Francisco
49ers football player in the early ’60s, points out,
“I’m a big guy. When we’re working in here, we
aren’t tripping over each other, even when our guests
get into the act.”
“We often serve food buffet-style at the
island and eat at the table in the dining area,” Marci
says. “Everyone serves themselves. We like to serve
smaller dishes and lots of them—roasted vegetables, two
or three different salads, risottos, pastas, and meats.
That’s the way they eat in Sardinia.”
With so many different dishes come
mountains of dirty ones. Marci came up with a solution to
that problem. Two deep drawers to the left of the sink are
divided into four laminated and waterproof compartments.
After a meal, Marci and Lou simply bus the dishes into a
couple of bins, as at a restaurant, then place the bins in
the drawers. No mess, nothing to distract them from their
guests, and everything can be easily taken care of later
that night. And as Marci says, “If the dishes don’t
get done after the party, you don’t wake up to a big
mess the next morning.”
Good friends, food, wine, and laughter are
the ingredients that combine to make the Palatella kitchen
the special place that it is. “When I think of Marci and
Lou,” says Martin, “I think: ‘abondanza,’ which is
Italian for abundance. And they truly are abundant
people—generous and fun.
