Kitchen and Bathroom Remodeling in Villa Park, CA

The smallest city, the same problem in every house

Villa Park is about two square miles, has almost no commercial land, and is made up overwhelmingly of half-acre-and-larger residential parcels. The homes on them are large — long single-storey customs from the 1960s and 70s, mostly, with formal living and dining rooms across the front.

And behind those formal rooms, a modest closed kitchen with a breakfast nook next to it. That is not a design failure; it is what a kitchen was for when these houses were drawn. It is simply out of step with how the same houses get used now, when the kitchen is where everyone actually ends up.

So the Villa Park brief is nearly always the same: take the wall out between the kitchen and whatever is beside it — the nook, the family room, sometimes the formal dining room that nobody has eaten in for a decade — and make one room. The square footage exists in these houses. The kitchen was just never given any of it.

After the wall, the cabinetry

Once the room is one room, the cabinetry has to cover a much longer run and a larger island than the original plan carried. Stock sizing gets awkward at that scale, which is why custom cabinetry is common here — and why islands in these projects are usually drawn rather than selected.

Where the run is staying and the boxes are sound, refacing remains the better buy, and 1960s Villa Park carcasses are frequently better built than the 1990s ones we see elsewhere. Slab worktops replace the original tile in essentially every project.

Doing it once

Because these are large houses with long ground floors, flooring is a bigger decision here than in most cities — a continuous floor across the whole ground floor is what makes an opened-up plan read as one space rather than two rooms with the wall gone. It wants deciding before the cabinetry, not after.

The other Villa Park pattern is the laundry and mudroom. On half-acre lots with side and rear access, these rooms take real traffic and are almost always under-fitted. Specifying them with the kitchen is far easier than matching them later.

Bathrooms

The primary bathrooms in these houses are usually generous in footprint and dated in fit — a large room with a small shower, a tub nobody uses and one vanity. There is normally room for a proper walk-in shower and a double vanity without moving a wall, which makes them satisfying projects.

Getting started

Kitchen Cabinets and Beyond has worked in Orange County since 1995 and holds California contractor licence #902246. Villa Park is about twelve minutes from the showroom.

Book a visit or ask for a free estimate — and bring the floor plan if you have one. Here the question is which wall, and a plan answers it fastest.