Hilton Carter’s Kitchen Remodel Swaps the Dining Room

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What do you do when the kitchen feels wrong and the dining room feels wasted? If you’re Hilton Carter, you swap them. Call it musical chairs for grown-ups—with better lighting and a built-in espresso station. In Unfurled: Designing a Living Home, the interior and plant stylist makes the case for designing a home that fits the way you actually live, not the way tradition tells you to.

Read on for an excerpt from the book, where Carter explains why flow matters more than formality—and how his family landed on a layout that really works.

Before: The Dining Room

French doors that open to a sunroom — The dining room as it was when we first bought the house, before it became our kitchen. A pair of French doors divided the then dining room from the sunroom.

Have you ever lived in a house where you wished the kitchen was located where the dining room was? Well, that’s exactly how we felt the first time we saw our house. One thing Fiona and I noticed while living in our apartment was that, during parties, everyone always ended up in the kitchen. No matter how small the space, it seemed to be where everyone naturally gathered.

Our dining room, on the other hand, was only used occasionally for formal dinners. So when we first viewed this house, we came primed with the knowledge that the kitchen in our “forever home” had to be a place that would allow for everyone to come together comfortably and enjoy spending time.

After: The Kitchen

Getting the layout of a new kitchen right is important. The key to a feeling of flow and efficiency is the “work triangle,” which connects the three most-utilized areas: the sink, the refrigerator, and the stove. Plan this right and the way you move in the kitchen will feel easy and natural, almost like a dance.

Frequently used cookbooks, a Danish portable cordless table lamp, and a Stromanthe sanguinea ‘Triostar’ in a self-watering glazed ceramic planter are housed in red-oak-lined cubbies. Next to this is what is probably my favorite feature in the whole kitchen—the appliance garage. This holds our espresso machine, grinder, cups, and bags of local Baltimore brand Ceremony Coffee in my favorite ﬂavor, Mass Appeal.

Before: The Kitchen

We decided to move the kitchen to the other side of the house as, being on the north-west side, the room felt too dark and moody for a kitchen but just right for a dining room.

After: The Dining Room

Stone table and white walls in dining room

Is it just me, or is the formal dining room a thing of the past? Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a traditional dining room where we all gather around the table to eat with family and friends. But those perfectly pristine spaces, dedicated only to formal events or special occasions, are now “gone like the winters of yesteryear.” Well, at least in my home they are. For us, the dining room is a room to enjoy every day; somewhere to eat dinner at night, with guests or just the family, where our kids can do homework or work on school projects, and a place to play games or build puzzles. So when we first came to see the house, we knew just what we were looking for in a dining room.