Completed Project · Sunnyvale, CA
An XL custom kitchen in a 1985 Sunnyvale home. A load-bearing wall removed to join the kitchen, living room and hallway into one space, with the gas line, sink and venting all relocated and new wood flooring carried through the entire house.
The finished kitchen, looking back toward the living room through the opening where the original wall stood. The white oak slat screen on the right is where the hallway used to end in drywall.
Most of the kitchens we open up in this part of the Bay Area come out of the postwar boom. This one did not. The house was built in 1985, which by Sunnyvale standards makes it a relatively young home. Good bones, generous ceiling height, sound framing, nothing structurally tired about it.
And that was exactly the problem the owners kept running into. When a house is genuinely old, everyone accepts that it needs work. When a house is forty years old and in good condition, the case for a full remodel is harder to make to yourself. Nothing is broken. Nothing is failing. It simply does not feel like the house it should be.
What they had was a kitchen that had been designed for a way of living that was already on its way out when the house was built. Walled off from the living room. A hallway that dead-ended into drywall. A kitchen you could not see out of and a living room you could not see into. Everything worked. Nothing connected.
The phrase the homeowners used when we first walked the property was that the design did not match the feeling of the house. That is a hard brief to price and an easy one to understand. The volume was there. The light was there. The layout was fighting both of them.
The wall between the kitchen and the living room was load-bearing. That single fact is what separated this project from a cosmetic refresh, and it is the reason the answer took twelve weeks instead of six.
Removing a load-bearing wall is not a demolition question, it is a load path question. The weight that wall was carrying has to arrive at the foundation some other way, which means an engineered beam sized for the span, posts at each end sized for the point loads, and a path through the floor structure down to something that can take it.
None of that is exotic. What it does mean is that the project starts with structural engineering rather than with a cabinet layout, and that the drawings submitted to the City have to show existing and proposed walls and flag clearly which ones are being removed. That is written into what the City asks for on a residential kitchen remodel submittal, and getting it right the first time is the difference between a clean plan check and a round of corrections.
Once the beam was in and the posts were carrying, the house changed character in a single afternoon. The kitchen, the living room and the hallway stopped being three rooms and became one space with three functions. The hallway that used to end in a wall now ends in a white oak slat screen, which reads as a design element rather than as the place where a wall used to be.
The new layout only works if the cooking and cleaning zones sit where the room now wants them, not where the 1985 plumbing happened to land. So three things moved, and each one carried its own consequences.
The gas line for the range. Relocating a gas supply is straightforward work done properly and a serious matter done carelessly. New run, correct sizing, pressure tested, inspected. It also fixes the range position for good, so the decision has to be right before anything is cut.
The sink. Moving a sink means new supply lines and, more importantly, a new drain with the correct fall. Drains are unforgiving. Water only goes downhill, and the further a fixture travels from the existing stack the more carefully the run has to be planned within the floor structure you actually have.
The venting. The hood needed a proper exterior run rather than a recirculating compromise. On an XL kitchen with a professional range, ventilation is not a detail, it is the thing that decides whether the open plan you just built is pleasant to cook in.
Relocating fixtures is also the point at which a kitchen project moves firmly into permit territory. That was never in question here given the structural work, but it is worth understanding that moving a sink alone is enough to change how a kitchen remodel is classified in most Bay Area cities. We cover how that works in Sunnyvale specifically on our Sunnyvale kitchen remodel page.
An XL kitchen is not simply a large kitchen. It is a kitchen with more of everything running to it, and the house has to be able to feed it.
A professional range. A hood with real extraction. An island long enough to seat four with power at the island itself. Under-cabinet lighting on its own switch. Recessed lighting through a ceiling that is now carrying an open plan rather than a room. A refrigerator, a dishwasher, a disposal, and every countertop receptacle protected and spaced to current requirements.
Add all of that up and you are asking a 1985 electrical service to do something it was never laid out to do. Which is why this project included a new electrical subpanel.
Panel capacity is the question we answer at the first walkthrough, never at rough electrical. Discovering it late does not just cost money. It stops the job while the answer gets sorted, and a stopped job is the most expensive kind.
The subpanel gave the kitchen dedicated capacity without disturbing the rest of the house, and it left headroom. That last part matters more than people expect. Kitchens gain load over time. An induction range later, a second oven, a wine fridge in the island. A panel sized only for today is a panel you open again in five years.
When you remove a wall, you inherit a flooring problem. There is a strip of subfloor where the wall used to sit, and whatever flooring ran up to that wall on either side now has to meet in the middle. In a house where the kitchen, hallway and living room all had different treatments, there is no version of that which looks intentional.
So the flooring went in new, and it went in throughout the entire house. Wide plank wood, one direction, one continuous surface from the front door through to the far end of the plan. No thresholds. No transitions. No moments where the floor announces that it used to be two rooms.
That is the part of an open plan that people feel without being able to name. The wall coming down is what you notice. The floor running through uninterrupted is what makes it read as one space rather than two rooms with a hole between them.
It is also a meaningful share of both the budget and the twelve week timeline. Whole-house flooring is not a kitchen line item, and it is one of the honest reasons this project sat at ninety five thousand rather than the sixty to eighty a large kitchen alone would carry.
The design brief was that the kitchen should feel like it belonged to the house, so the palette was deliberately restrained and built on three materials doing very different jobs.
Graphite flat-panel cabinetry gives the room its weight. Flat panel rather than shaker, because a 1985 house does not want to be dressed up as something older than it is. The colour is dark enough to anchor a large open plan without turning the room heavy, and the long horizontal pulls keep the runs reading as lines rather than as a grid of doors.
Butcher block on the island is the warmth. In a kitchen with this much cabinetry and this much stone, an all-stone island would have made the space feel like a showroom. Wood on the island softens the whole room and it is the surface people actually touch, which is the right place to put something that improves with use.
Full-height marble on the perimeter is the luxury note, and running it to the underside of the uppers rather than stopping at a standard backsplash height is what makes it read as architecture instead of as tile. It is a small decision on a drawing and a large one in the room.
Then the white oak. The slat screen at the end of the hallway, the door, and the flooring all pull from the same warm tone, which is what stops the graphite and the marble from feeling cold. That is the thread that ties the kitchen back to the rest of the house, and it is the answer to the brief the owners gave us on day one.
A large kitchen on its own runs six to eight weeks of construction. This one ran twelve, and the extra time is fully accounted for.
Structural work sits at the front of the schedule and cannot be compressed. Engineering has to be drawn and reviewed before the beam goes in, and the beam has to go in before anything downstream can start. Relocating gas, drain and venting adds rough plumbing and rough mechanical inspections that a pull-and-replace kitchen never sees. The subpanel adds its own electrical rough. And whole-house flooring is a phase in its own right, laid after the wet work is finished and before the final trim and finish stage.
None of that is delay. It is sequence. The projects that overrun are the ones where the sequence was not planned, where the structural answer arrived late, or where the panel question got asked at rough electrical instead of at the first walkthrough. Twelve weeks planned is a considerably better outcome than eight weeks promised and fourteen delivered.
Everything included in the twelve weeks, permitted through the City of Sunnyvale and signed off at final inspection.
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Looking back through the opening where the load-bearing wall stood. The slat screen marks where the hallway used to dead-end.
The island straight on. Butcher block top, seating for four, three oval pendants centered on the run.
The range wall. Marble carried full height to the underside of the uppers, with the relocated gas line and new venting behind it.
Graphite flat-panel cabinetry with long horizontal pulls and deep drawer banks either side of the range.
The reverse angle, with the marble perimeter counter running away to the left and the new flooring carrying straight through.
If there is a wall in your house that you have been staring at for years, the useful first question is not what it would look like without it. It is whether it is carrying anything, and where that load would go instead.
That is a question we answer by walking the property, before anything is drawn and before you have paid for a design that may not be buildable. The consultation is free and there is no obligation, and if what you want is not realistic in your house we will tell you on day one.
See how we approach a kitchen remodel in Sunnyvale, including the City's current permit requirements, or read the regional picture on our kitchen remodel Bay Area page.