The radiant slab
Your heat is cast into the floor. What that means before you move a sink, a dishwasher, or an island.
Planning an Eichler Kitchen
What the architecture will and won't allow
The five rules your house puts on a kitchen, what the architecture allows instead, and who settles each decision.
A cabinetry and layout guide, not structural advice about your specific house.
- The guide opens on this page as soon as you ask for it
- 11 pages, about fifteen minutes
- Designing Bay Area kitchens from the Mountain View showroom since 2004
What you get
Five constraints, and what to do about each one
Most kitchen advice assumes an attic, a crawl space, and stud walls you can run anything through. Your house has none of those. The guide works through what that changes, one constraint per page.
No attic
Where the storage has to go instead, and how deep cabinets with the right fittings work when going tall is not an option.
The flat roof
Where a range hood actually exits when there is no attic to run a duct through.
The ceiling is the roof
Lighting the room properly without cutting recessed cans into the tongue and groove.
Character
Whether flat-panel European cabinetry belongs in an Eichler, and what makes it read right.
Four things the house makes easier
Non-structural partitions, daylight from directions most kitchens never get, and a design language that is already settled.
Who settles what
Every page separates the cabinetry decisions from the ones your architect, engineer, or trades own.
Nine questions to answer first
Work through these before anyone quotes you and you are ahead of most projects we see.
Who this is for
Owners who would rather learn the rules before they fall in love with a layout
Not every Eichler is identical. Models vary, atriums are not universal, and many homes have had heating, roofing, or wiring changed in the last seventy years. Treat the guide as the set of questions to ask about your house, not a description of it.
- You own an Eichler in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Mateo, or nearby.
- You are early enough that the layout is still a question, not a done drawing.
- You want to know which decisions are yours, which are your architect's, and which are ours.
- You would rather read for fifteen minutes than find out during the build.
Who wrote it
A custom cabinetry design showroom in Mountain View
Artistic Kitchen designs the kitchen and the cabinetry, and sees the cabinetry through to installation. The guide comes out of doing this work in these houses. That is why it spends as much time on who decides what as it does on cabinetry.
Artistic Kitchen designs the kitchen and the cabinetry and coordinates the process. We do not perform construction, structural, plumbing, electrical, or roofing work. Already working with an architect or a builder? We work hand in hand with them.
- Since 2004Designing kitchens in the Bay Area
- 5.0Google rating
- A+, accredited 2007Better Business Bureau
- Best of Houzz2016, 2018, 2022, 2023, 2025, 2026
How it works
Three steps, and the third one is optional
Add your first name and email
That is the whole form. No ZIP, no budget question, no phone unless you want us to have it.
The guide opens right here
The download link appears on this page as soon as you send the form. Save the PDF so it is there when the layout questions start.
Bring the house with you, if you want to go further
Photographs of your ceiling line, beam spacing, and where your heat comes from are a good start. To design the kitchen properly we also need a floor plan or the room's measurements, and your appliance choices if you have made them.
Do you own an Eichler?
Then come and see the cabinetry in person. Put a flat-panel door up against what you already have at home, and ask the questions the guide raised. The first conversation happens in the Mountain View showroom, with the actual doors and finishes in front of you.
A conversation about your house and your options, in person at the showroom.
Artistic Kitchen Cabinets & Design is a custom cabinetry design firm. We do not perform construction, structural, plumbing, electrical, or roofing work. The guide is general and is not a substitute for advice from your own architect, engineer, or contractor about your specific house.
