Liquid Assets!

Originally published on Friday January 19, 2007 in the Portland Tribune:

Liquid asset
• Beer-loving couple turns pint-size kitchen into keg-size entertainment center

By SUZIE RIDGWAY
for The Tribune’s
Home section

When Lisa Morrison and her husband, Mark Campbell, made the decision to remodel the kitchen in their 1909 house off of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, they knew that they wanted a large, functional space that allowed them to enjoy and entertain with their favorite beverage: beer.
The custom beer kitchen not only supplies the couple with cold beer, but it also offers ample space for cooking, working and entertaining friends.
“Remodels take on the personality of the homeowner,” says Mark Hylland, owner of Oregon Home Services LLC, the design/build company that built the couple’s beer kitchen.
Morrison, known far and wide as the “beer goddess” for her knowledge and written beer critiques, and Campbell share a serious love for the beverage.
“My husband and I are big beer fans,” she says. “We home brew. We make all of our vacations around beer.”
To meet their needs, an addition was built onto the home to accommodate the kitchen, as well as a laundry room and powder room.
“They had a tiny kitchen. It was about the size of a small closet and we quadrupled its size,” Hylland says.
The beer kitchen project, along with the rest of the home’s remodeling projects, took about six months to complete.
The remodeled kitchen has Shaker-style cherry cabinets, black granite countertops with a herringbone tile backsplash. The flooring is finished in warm brown shades, all in complementary colors of beer.
A custom built-in cabinet that delivers beer from two taps and displays the couple’s vast collection of pint glasses is what Morrison has affectionately dubbed her “beer doo-dah.”
When the couple and remodeling crew began discussing the design of the kitchen, no one was sure what to call the beer cabinet because none of them had ever done anything quite like it before.
“I just started calling it the beer doo-dah and actually, on our blueprints, it says, ‘beer doo-dah,’” Morrison says.
When Morrison and Campbell were contemplating the remodel, they tossed around ideas about what they wanted, liked and what was absolutely necessary.
“The beer doo-dah bordered between have-to have it and like-to have it, so it ranked pretty high up there. We knew exactly where we were going to put it. So everything was just kind of perfect for it,” she says.
The beer cabinet contains two taps fed by a large, cooled pipe that keeps the lines cold while delivering beer from two of six kegs housed in the basement. A restaurant back-bar cooler, purchased from eBay, refrigerates the kegs.
The floor, one of the most striking features of the kitchen, is made from two coordinating shades of Marmoleum, a product created from linseed oil, resins and wood flour with jute backing.
The floor inlay, the darker of the two shades, flows diagonally from one corner of the kitchen to the other and into the laundry room.
“We call it the river of beer,” she says, adding that the reason for the design is that they wanted to make sure the additional floor space didn’t seem too cavernous.
They decided to visually cut it in half with the river of beer, which made for a more cohesive look.
Morrison says that the kitchen is one big room that is part kitchen, part entertainment area.
In addition to the standard appliances, the area includes a full-height pantry, as well a large island in the middle with a gas cooktop on one side and an informal dining area with barstools on the other.
The entertainment area has a desk and a long countertop that can be used as a food staging area for their formal dining room or for serving appetizers during a party, along with the beer doo-dah.
“Everybody needs a doo-dah,” she says.
Morrison says that the inspiration for the beer kitchen remodel came from seeing other homes, such as rooms in upscale homes from the Street of Dreams.
“They always have these wine things that are so nice, but even if there is anything about beer, it’s usually tucked away somewhere, kind of like the evil stepchild,” Morrison says.
“We live in the most amazing place for craft beer. I really wanted to give craft beer credit where it’s due, so I built this really beautiful thing around beer so that people can walk in and say, ‘Wow, that is absolutely gorgeous.’ This is something you can actually highlight, be proud of and show off,” Morrison says.
“I absolutely adore the kitchen. It’s just made life so much easier. Something that we really didn’t anticipate was just how much easier things are. We feel like we’re not fighting the house,” she says.
“I telecommute to work every day and I actually have an office in my home, but I find that I love hanging out in my kitchen so much that, a lot of times, I’ll take my laptop and wander outside of my office and come and sit in my kitchen.”