How They Pulled It Off: A Reclaimed Wood Countertop at the Heart of a Kitchen Renovation
Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.
It’s not every day that you put the wood flooring of a former bowling alley in a residential kitchen—even for architect Lindsey Wikstrom, whose New York–based firm Mattaforma specializes in sustainable sourcing, including using reclaimed and renewable materials. But when clients Laura (an Emmy-award-winning TV writer) and Darryl (a lawyer) connected with her and expressed their interest in using "materials that brought stories with them" for their home in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, reclaimed wood felt like the right choice.
The kitchen was designed with off-white cabinets. Touches of wood and saturated reds in the lighting and flooring add warmth. "We helped them find the right balance of colorful and calm and woody for them," notes Wikstrom.
Laura, Darryl, and their two cats, Gus and Hammy, sought to update their home but keep the quirky, historic detailing that made it feel lived-in and comforting. The duplex takes up two floors of a three-story wood-frame home originally built as a single-family, Victorian-style residence in the early 1900s. Over time, the house was converted into two units: one on the ground floor (which would remain untouched by Wikstrom) and a second unit on the second and third floors that was the focus of the renovation.
The three-story home in Brooklyn's suburban Ditmas Park neighborhood was built in the early 1900s, and its traditional layout and historic detailing like original parquet flooring with decorative inlays was typical of the time.
Wikstrom described the unit’s existing condition as "very outdated" and inefficient. Circuitous routes led through the kitchen or living and dining areas in order to reach the bedrooms, and the kitchen, with its dark wood cabinetry and granite countertops, hadn’t been renovated in decades.
"For all rooms, the client and our team were dedicated to the idea of color immersion, especially in small spaces like the bathrooms and hallways," Wikstrom explains. The guest bath, for example, is covered in sea green, from tiled walls to painted ceiling.
But rather than gutting the entire unit down to the studs, her proposal retained most walls and only did careful, tactical removals to create new openings and thus new circulation patterns. This was budget-conscious and helped to retain the traditional spatial division among spaces that Laura and Darryl liked. What’s more, the approach not only retained historic features and character, but also made for a flow that kept the kitchen at the heart of the home—"a very comfortable place to cook and host," explains Wikstrom.
Mattaforma had extensive experience working with sustainable materials. Even so, "it’s our first biodiverse reclaimed countertop!" notes Wikstrom.
Circulation was rerouted by creating new wall openings and shifting walls so that awkward spaces were reproportioned. The bathrooms were also refinished with new tile and paint. But the kitchen was the one space that saw the most change.
Adjustments to partitions maximized storage space and minimized structural elements; for example, a cookbook shelf ingeniously hides structure above the peninsula opening on the kitchen side. The material palette for the kitchen was developed so that it felt minimal in a calm off-white, but with a dark maroon clay tile that contrasted with the original parquet floors. The new peninsula countertop in the kitchen, made from reclaimed wood, opens the kitchen up to the dining area, while still maintaining a sense of separation. Wikstrom knew Laura and Darryl were interested in spaces that felt lived-in rather than precious, so she proposed a butcher block–like countertop and received a positive response from the couple—so long as the block was reclaimed wood rather than brand new.
Continuing with the idea of immersive color in smaller spaces, the stairwell’s paper-bag brown hue was inspired by artist Josef Albers many color studies, especially the Homage to the Square series.
Sawkill Lumber, a company that Mattaforma worked with in the past, provides custom milled flooring, paneling, and lumber, and typically has both dimensional lumber and reclaimed wood reworked into slabs. When Wikstrom did her outreach, the only slab they had available at the time was made of flooring from a former bowling alley in upstate New York. The slab, composed of maple and pine, was durable and ideal not just for heavy bowling balls, but also for chopping vegetables and spilling drinks—perfect for Laura and Darryl’s holiday cooking and hosting.
How they pulled it off: A bowling alley’s second life
- The bowling alley slab is a mix of hardwood (maple) and softwood (pine). Both species are "old growth," which means their trees were allowed to mature naturally, resulting in tight, dense growth rings—creating a durable surface able to withstand the demands of a kitchen countertop.
Reclaimed wood bears the scars of its past, with indentations, nail holes, manufacturer’s stamps, and other markings, and is inherently sustainable because you’re reusing an existing material, saving it from the landfill and taking advantage of its low carbon footprint. Before salvaging and reusing wood, it’s important to make sure that fasteners like nails and screws have been removed.
While Sawkill Lumber stores individual reclaimed boards at their Brooklyn location, their slabs are stored in upstate New York—which meant that the slab had to be delivered to the project’s millworker in Jersey City, New Jersey. The millworker gave the slab a final sanding down, cut it to size, and brought it to site with the rest of the kitchen.
The minimal removal of walls helped reduce risks during construction. "Moving walls in an old building is nerve wracking because you’re not sure what kind of structure is in there and how robust it still is," explains Wikstrom.
So far, the countertop and kitchen as a whole have been a great success. "Laura and Darryl have shared with us how they love hosting family for the holidays in the space, which brings us so much joy to hear," says Wikstrom.
In the end, the surgical renovation encompassed only 235 square feet of spaces that received new finishes and new walls on the second floor and 350 square feet on the third floor. But that’s not to say it didn’t have a big impact: "With renovations, I’m really obsessed with minimizing our work to create the maximum impact. Doing less to create more feels really good in old buildings," Wikstrom explains.
Project Credits:
Architect of Record: Mattaforma / @mattaforma
Builder: Black Square Builders
Millwork/Cabinetry: Cornell Design Build
Reclaimed Wood: Sawkill Lumber Company
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