unreal estate: a moody kitchen.

a very good light fixture hack and permission to be a little bit reckless.

Rental apartment kitchen design and photograph by Stephen Kent Johnson; product photography linked below; collage by yours truly.

The wish for a home was intense, yet I could not place it geographically, nor did I know how to achieve such a spectacular house with my precarious income. All the same, I added it to my imagined property portfolio, along with a few other imagined minor properties. …In this sense, I owned some unreal estate.

- Deborah Levy, Real Estate

Yesterday morning, a promising lead on a neighborhood apartment ended with the landlord declining to show us the apartment because we have three kids. So! It’s rough out here, but I keep telling myself that every no gets us closer to yes. Right?Anyway! Onward.

For this installment of unreal estate, I decided to lean into the possibilities for transforming rental kitchens without wielding a sledgehammer. I’ve seen my share of doozies in the past week, and still, just about everywhere has promise for some amount of transformation, wholesale gutting not required.

I painted our mismatched oak cabinets white after we moved into our current apartment. The cabinet paint has held up beautifully, all thanks to Stix primer, probably, but New York City landlords’ preferences for childless couples aside, I do in fact have three children and painting kitchen cabinets a darker color would mean somewhat less opportunity for blueberry fingerprints to show up every morning.

For our consideration, Stephen Kent Johnson’s West Village Rental Kitchen (1), which I’m nearly certain features not only painted over countertops, but a painted over tile backsplash too.

Here’s to throwing caution to the wind.