Before & After: Tumbled Stone and a Hand-Built Hearth Bring Rustic Elegance to a Victorian London Kitchen

PublishedJul 16, 2026 2:00 AM EDT

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Laura Parkinson approaches every brief with a maker's pragmatism. "Our starting point is always: tell us what you're dreaming of and we'll figure out how to deliver it," says the founder of London studio Palmer & Stone. The homeowners of this Victorian terrace had an unusual request: they wanted dual ovens—an iconic AGA alongside a conventional electric fan oven. "Cooking is central to their lifestyle, and an AGA had always been part of the fantasy," Parkinson explains.

But the room needed more than surface-level styling. "The configuration, the functionality, the complete absence of heating—it simply wasn't a space you wanted to spend time in," Parkinson recalls. The spoiler: meticulous spatial planning turned the double-oven ambition into reality. From there, Parkinson leaned into her signature approach of specifying natural materials—marble, bronze, limestone—that develop character with age. Here, she walks through how she wove warmth and utility into a kitchen built for serious home cooks.

"For an AGA to feel right in a London townhouse, it needs to command the room—not sit awkwardly in a corner," Parkinson reasons. These storied ranges are the heart of sprawling country kitchens across England; why shouldn't the same logic apply here? She designed a false chimney breast, allowing the cooker to be recessed into the wall while the extraction unit disappeared entirely behind the surround.

By softening the edges of the new surround with chamfered detailing, "it avoids feeling blocky—it reads as though it could have been carved from stone," she notes. And because the chimney is non-structural, it didn't compromise the full-depth drawers beneath.

A few drawers along, the gas hob and electric oven provide faster cooking for weekday suppers. Once again, the extractor is ingeniously tucked within wall-mounted cabinetry. The streamlined hood disguise ensures that even with two cookers in the room, the kitchen never feels appliance-heavy.

From the outset, Parkinson recognized that a fixed island would make the kitchen feel visually weighted down, but with two cookers and an extra-wide sink, she needed to offer additional prep area. Enter the freestanding butcher's block. While Parkinson was prepared to commission something bespoke, her client ended up discovering the ideal vintage piece on her own: a time-worn, narrow-profile wooden prep table. "The beautiful part is that she devoted her weekends to restoring it, painting the base in a shade from our kitchen palette," Parkinson shares.

For some, a natural palette reads as beige and brown restraint, but Parkinson sees red and yellow as perfectly viable neutrals when deployed with intention. The latter proved ideal for framing the glazed wall cupboards. The specific shade—an amber-toned yellow pulled from Farrow & Ball's archive—leans slightly orange, "and to temper that warmth, I felt it needed something with a muddy, grounded quality," the designer suggests. A deep khaki green struck the perfect balance between heritage character and contemporary freshness.

Embracing the country kitchen aesthetic, Parkinson selected tumbled limestone underfoot. The critical decision was using compact-format tiles. "In certain settings, wide flagstones work beautifully, but here they would have compressed the space," she clarifies. "Smaller cobbles create an optical illusion—the brain reads the repeated pattern as expanse, so the room feels larger than its footprint." Radiant floor heating, meanwhile, dials up the comfort factor.

Flanking the kitchen are two understated yet hardworking full-height cabinets. The unit beside the sink conceals a single refrigerator-freezer, while the one near the electric oven doubles as a cleaning closet—housing a mop, broom, and vacuum—and a mechanical hub for the home's fuse boxes. The game of concealment continues beneath the sink, where a canvas-textured skirt hides the clients' Le Creuset collection. "The fabric is quite substantial, because let's be honest—when you're washing up, pasta water inevitably splashes over the edge, and this material handles that beautifully," Parkinson says.

Parkinson transformed the kitchen's underwhelming seating zone—previously just a log burner with an overbearing flue and a solitary armchair—into an inviting dining area. Wall-mounted sconces and a pendant fixture carve out the dining zone as its own destination within the larger space, as does the slim built-in housing the clients' cookbook collection. The designer considered a built-in banquette, "but ultimately we loved the slightly unstudied quality of freestanding chairs," she explains.

The sole survivor from the kitchen's previous incarnation is an oversized industrial steel lantern suspended at the room's center. "In this newly curated context, it's precisely my aesthetic," Parkinson says. "Sometimes the most unexpected element already in your home becomes the thread that ties everything together."

Olivia Lidbury is a freelance writer based in the U.K. She has been regularly contributing to Domino since 2021, pitching charming British houses, whimsical apartments and must-see vacation stays. Olivia also regularly writes for a number of national U.K. titles such asThe TimesandThe Sunday Times Stylemagazine. She lives just outside of London in Kent.

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