Designing My Someday, Somehow Dream Kitchen
And how I am willing it into existence
Today’s issue of À La Carte is sponsored by Isla Porter.
I’ve always dreamed of buying an old home and making it my life’s work to slowly renovate it to perfection. The house I grew up in and my parents still live in was built in the ‘70s, and when we moved into it in 1993 I think my parents had the same vision—to save up and, over the course of many years, make changes to its design that reflected their own personal style. After 30+ years of living there, they just renovated the last bathroom.
My mom’s an interior designer, so dreaming up spaces has been a sort of family hobby for as long as I can remember. Years ago, when I lived in my very first solo apartment, she and I would stand in my rental kitchen with crusty old cabinets (that had been painted over 1,000 times) and imagine what it would be like to knock out the wall in my dining room and redesign the kitchen to be double the size. Of course, it was so comically far beyond the realm of reality to even consider, but it was fun to discuss it as if it weren’t.
It will be a little while before my home renovation dreams become a reality, but I don’t let that stop me from imagining the possibilities. My dream kitchen, like everything else I love, references the past but stands the test of time: dark wood, good light, polished nickel fixtures, square handmade tiles. You can’t quite place it in any one place or era, but it’s warm, inviting, and feels like it’s been there forever (but, obviously, with brand new appliances.) I’ve designed and redesigned my future home in my head so many times that I’m actually convinced I can will it into existence someday. It’s why I enjoy writing my Room Recipe column so much—it feels like training for the day the universe/the housing market/my bank account finally presents me with the opportunity to do it for real.
In the meantime, I soak up as much home reno content as I can, from tuning into Annie Meyers-Shyer’s stories as she designs her family home in Beverly Hills to rewatching old episodes of Leanne Ford’s HGTV show on repeat. I follow tons of fabricators and furniture designers on Instagram in hopes that one day I’ll be hiring them to bring my dream home to life, and one that I have filed in my mental filing system is cabinetry brand Isla Porter.
Isla Porter was founded by furniture industry veterans Sharon Dranko and Emily Arthur just last year. The pair saw an opportunity to personalize and streamline the kitchen design process, utilizing AI tools alongside a team of knowledgeable designers to prioritize innovation and creativity over the cookie cutter sameness that permeates the kitchen design space. In a world where we’re constantly presented with design “solutions” that sacrifice quality and individuality for cheaper costs and faster timelines, Isla Porter rethinks the way we approach design in our homes, letting their customers into the parts of the design process that are oftentimes a mystery. Isla Porter’s cabinetry line includes a huge range of finishes, door shapes, and customizable details (fluted glass! Fun cutouts! A million colors!) that allow an interior designer or a homeowner to truly express their creativity without limitations.
I was introduced to Sharon and Emily via
’s Leonora Epstein recently and really enjoyed chatting with them about Isla Porter’s beginnings, what it’s like to be female founders in a male-dominated field, and what advice they have for those of us dreaming of our someday homes.Ali LaBelle: Tell me a little about how Isla Porter got started. Where were each of you before, and what led you here?
Emily Arthur: I started off in product development. It was a long time ago that I went to school at this point, but at the time I really wanted to work for Martha Stewart, and I did. Martha really cultivated what it meant to be in the product space for the home and kind of kicked off what we see today in that landscape. Quickly, I realized I really loved furniture. I went to RISD, which has a very hands-on approach, so you have to make everything—you have to learn how to do joinery, you have to learn how to work in a woodshop and run machinery. So because of all that experience, I was so excited to get into the manufacturing space and understand products at a large scale. When I started working at West Elm, I was primarily designing bedroom furniture, and I got to go overseas and see how everything was made. It taught me a lot about how to design within the limitations of manufacturing and how to use it to one’s advantage.
Sharon Dranko: Em and I worked together at West Elm in Brooklyn for many, many years, and during COVID we started actually commuting to work together. That was 3 hours round-trip, every day, on the bus from Jersey to Brooklyn and back. At the same time, just like everyone else during COVID, we were renovating our homes, each going through the kitchen design process ourselves and realizing how uninspiring kitchen cabinetry really was. So we said, you know what? I think we could do something about this.
You know, Em is an amazing product designer. My background is really operations, logistics, merchandising—the functional side of running a designer product-based business. We were asking, What's really happening in millworking? What's really happening in the interior design world, and why can't people access that? Why isn't there a modern take anywhere on what cabinetry could be?
So Emily started designing the line and we began the process of looking for manufacturing partners. We've talked to so many different people, and I quickly realized that the manufacturing industry itself was a big reason why many people didn't have access to design. The build space—cabinetry, millwork, construction—is unfortunately run by a lot of old men who don't value creativity and think they know best.
AL: What’s it like running a female-founded company in this environment?
SD: Even when you’re working with female designers, at the end of the day you’re often working with a male contractor who’s going to come in and say, No, you don’t really need to do this, or That’s not how you do that. It’s pretty crazy—sometimes they’ll even advise on creative decisions you didn’t ask for an opinion on. We call them the “khaki pants”—they’re all just these khaki pants hanging around telling us what to do, and it’s stifling innovation.
We were at a panel at High Point, the furniture market, a couple of months ago, and we were listening to an amazing female designer, Noz Nozawa, talk about how to improve this. All these female designers were talking about the negative experiences they’d had with male contractors and how oftentimes they’d had to, like, put their tails between their legs and apologize for having an attitude or make themselves smaller just to get things done and keep a project moving. Noz’s answer was, Well, the only way to make this better for female designers and homeowners is to start seeing representation in the trades. We’re actually in the early stages of working on a female trade program scholarship, so that’s something we’re excited to launch in the near future. We want to make sure people can have a great female-forward experience from soup to nuts in the design process.
EA: You have to have a lot of vision and you have to just keep showing up with solutions and drive. I'm not going to say that “men are like this” and “women are like that”—that's certainly not the case. There are two men that work on my team that are just extraordinary and so lovely and collaborative. But yeah, it can be unfortunate.
I'm usually the only woman in the room in my meetings with my manufacturers, and it depends on the other people around the table what you're going to get at any given time. But you get more confidence as you go. You do it enough times, you get the confidence to kind of help them see your vision. And yeah, I think it's hard. I do sometimes feel like I have to be a little bit of a different person in order to try to get them to feel like they’ve had the idea on their own. There's a lot of emotion and you look inward a ton, like, Should I even be doing this? Should I really contort myself and make myself small in this moment, or do I need to step in? It weighs on you. I'm a mom—I have a daughter—and I have teammates that are women that are younger than me and I struggle with it. I think every woman does, but you know, you just get through each meeting and each project and you care about the people that care about what you're trying to do.
AL: Isla Porter’s ethos is rooted in individuality, creativity, and quality. What does the landscape of the home renovation world look like right now, and how is Isla Porter challenging that?
SD: The process of designing a kitchen is not very scalable. We didn't want to open a normal showroom business that's just based in one location; we wanted to offer our product across the country. Measuring and technical expertise in kitchen designing is really a limitation in doing that.
Along the way in our journey, we met someone who was based out of Brooklyn that has a piece of technology, an AI engine, that is almost like an AI draftsperson. It allows us to make the design process a little bit more seamless. Traditionally, a designer is spending over 40, 50, 60 hours drafting and revising those documents—it's really not a fun, exciting part of the process, but it's a very necessary one. So we're basically taking that workload off of the kitchen designers and the interior designers and what have you and are putting that into the AI.
The process starts with a remote measurement scan. You take your phone, any iPhone 12 or above, and you scan a space using our app, which then generates measurements that are 95% accurate. That's not enough to cut a cabinetry order, but it is enough to get the project started, which is the holdup for most people. You need a quick estimate. You want to know if you can actually afford this kitchen. So we make it pretty easy for people to get started. The technology can understand not just your measurements, but, with a great likelihood, also your structural conditions. So yeah, it's pretty cool. It takes all of that info into account, generates thousands of different permutations, and the algorithm picks the best one.
EA: I started thinking about the cabinetry design process more like a product, where you get to use a toolkit of different design options beyond just choosing the doors. The hoods and islands and things we make give us the ability to create many, many different looks. Each kitchen’s end result is so different from the next. We really just want to be able to play with design, so we created a big immersive toolkit that creative people in the interiors space could have fun with.
AL: I feel like the conversation around AI as it pertains to design, and creatives in general, is really baked with a lot of fear. But the idea that AI can make the design process more efficient by allowing designers to lean into what they’re there to do, focusing on the creative, is really interesting.
SD: It’s true. We have licensed architects and kitchen designers on the Isla Porter staff looking at each plan. You're getting a lot of manual intervention along the way—we're not just letting robots design your kitchen. We're not at that point yet, and I hope we never are. The one thing that the AI doesn't touch at all is the creative. We're never using the AI to take an inspiration photo and then make it in our cabinetry—that's not the business that we're in.
We’re allowing creatives to have more time to truly be creative so they're not sitting there worrying about each individual rail matching up—that will all be done by the drafting tool—but they're still telling us what they really want the kitchen to look like. We’re spending that time saved really working with actual people and collaborating with them to understand their kitchen design needs and how they live.
AL: I may not be at the stage of life where I’m designing a home myself, but I am always scheming up plans for my dream kitchen, looking at inspiration images, and collecting ideas for someday. For someone who is maybe not renovating right now, what’s the biggest piece of advice you have when it comes to approaching design?
EA: You don't have to wait your life away for your dream kitchen. I really think that there are small things that you can do. Like, if you have a glossy counter, you can have someone come in and resurface it and make it honed. You can change your undermount, you can change your taps, change your hardware… Don't live for the “someday”, just let yourself have fun with design.
I can’t wait for the day when I’m standing in my kitchen with dark wood cabinets making a big pot of vodka sauce for Sunday dinner with some jazz playing in the background. I’ll smile thinking about this newsletter and the time my reality seemed so far away. In the meantime, I’ll be here, Googling pot racks for fun.
x
Ali
The inspiration images are so dreamy! However I also loved reading the Q&A with Sharon and Emily and hearing their story about building Isla Porter. I’m going to start dreaming about my dream kitchen now…
Dark wood, square tiles, and polished nickel yes yes yes. Also love the idea of a giant baroque oil painting in the kitchen: DRAMA!