Sustainable Kitchen Cabinet Refresh, Oxfordshire

Not every kitchen needs replacing. Sometimes the most sustainable and most satisfying decision is to look carefully at what’s already there and ask what it could become.

At Sotwell Manor, our clients were keen to modernise their kitchen without the waste and cost of a full replacement. The cabinets were in genuinely good condition, well-made, solidly built, worth saving. So rather than strip them out, we took the cabinet doors to our workshop, resprayed them in two carefully chosen colours from the Edward Bulmer range, and rehung them.

Edward Bulmer’s paints are among the most ecologically considered available, low VOC, water-based, plastic-free, carbon neutral, odourless and non-toxic. They are also, simply, beautiful to work with. The colours chosen bring a contemporary warmth to the kitchen while sitting naturally within the character of the manor.

New solid walnut handles were added to complete the refresh, a small change that shifts the whole feel of the space from dated to considered.

The result is a kitchen that looks and feels transformed, at a fraction of the environmental cost of starting again. This is what circular making looks like in practice: honest, pragmatic, and quietly radical.