Home with a range…or two or three

I must confess, I’d been scribbling proposed layouts for the 907 Franklin space since the first day Adam showed it to me. When I showed up at the Mirador Group office, my architect, Todd Blitzer, explained he’d be handling the drawings. “Hey,” I reprimanded, “some of us don’t get to draw for a living.” Then I told him about how I’d studied architecture as a teenager and he begin to forgive my micromanaging.
The drawing below portrays perfectly how I work. However shocking it may be, nearly a year later, all of the notes, numbers and random lines still mostly make sense to me!

After only a few hours of sitting down with Todd at Mirador we managed to clean up the space and get things in the right place. Then it was time to head down to Sugarland and discuss equipment with Willie McBride of Hangman Kitchen Outfitters, where I got to peruse equipment catalogs and play on Auto-Cad like an engineer in a candy store.

Looks a bit better, eh? Initial divide of the space was fairly clear as we wanted to keep the existing hood lines from the kitchens but had no use for the dining room. We then had to work within that constraint to share the existing bathrooms as they are fairly large and it would better allocate costs. I tried to maximize kitchen space while making the best use of existing plumbing and fixtures. I also squeezed in a tiny office in the corner!
These initial drawings took inspiration from the Kitchen Space in Austin both in what to do and mainly, in what not to do. After a day trip to visit their kitchens just a few months into their opening, I was able to assess this particular layout.

Though we had a few hundred more square feet to work with, I was also incorporating a café into the space. We also learned from the Kitchen Space team that existing storage space was limiting the number of businesses that could work out of the kitchen. As a result, we scrapped the conference room concept and found a way to integrate the demonstration and full-purpose kitchens to maximize storage space. We put in much of the same equipment, making our final decisions off of a survey that had been up on our website since the first day I bought the url. Do you remember that one? I also had my heart set on a cold prep room where high end chocolate and decorative work could be done at ease. Not wanting bathroom access to take café visitors passed endless walls of walk-ins, I moved those to the corner and set up dry storage shelves along the walkway. Further scribbling, we arrived at this iteration:

Traveling in Europe at the time these drawings were going through their final iterations, I was drawing edits on the files in free image editors and sending them back to Todd with scribbled notes. Rock star of an architect that he is, the floor plan took shape and by the time I got back, the MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing) engineering firm was already at work on the final drawings to be submitted to the City!
Still, I’ve moved a few things around to save space, time and money. In the final design, my office has shrunk and moved to the corner – who needs an office anyway? This allowed us to keep the Walk-in Cooler in its existing space, simply moving the door.