Shaker Kitchen Designs, Styles and Case Studies
Here are a few fine examples of Broadway's bespoke shaker kitchen designs installed in our customer's homes.
Founded in 1974, Broadway Kitchens designs, manufactures and will install your shaker kitchen specifically to your taste. We are renowned for creating outstanding bespoke shaker kitchens and have installed them all over the UK from our base in The Midlands, so contact us now and speak to one of our expert team.
Shaker Kitchens
When contemplating a bespoke Shaker Kitchen it’s worthwhile first looking into the origins of the term ‘Shaker’.
England in the mid 17th century and a religious sect, the ‘Quakers’ formed. Due to their animated and ecstatic style of worship, ‘trembling and quaking at the word of the Lord’, they became known as ‘Shakers’.
Their philosophy relating to furniture was one of functional form and proportion exemplifying simplicity without ornamentation, as inlays and carvings were viewed as ‘prideful and deceitful’. Showing-off was shunned in favour of elegant humble simplicity, practicality and versatility demonstrative of their ethos and lifestyle.
Consequently all furniture embodied their beliefs of cleanliness with minimal crevices for dirt to collect and, as “Friends of the Light”, few places for shadows to fall, hence Shaker kitchens were born.
As each kitchen was tailor-made to suit the owner and the application it followed that every Shaker Kitchen was truly bespoke. Finely hand-crafted, well-made carpentry with fine joints and silky-smooth finishing ensured that the Shakers manufactured kitchens of quality and durability. They believed that making something well was “an act of prayer and devotion” so each item epitomised simplicity whilst displaying understated elegance, care, skill and devotion in the pursuit of perfection.
The Shaker legacy is one of fine-quality, bespoke kitchen furniture with practical austerity and a crisp smoothness of visual aspect, bringing light where there was dark – precisely what a shaker-style kitchen achieves today.
In the late 1800’s into the 1900’s few people had electricity in the home so most rooms were relatively dark and sombre with dark stained natural wood furniture. A new enlightened generation was emerging from post-war dark days and preference was for hand painted kitchen furniture to bring light and cheer. Even from the earliest days Shaker kitchens were hand-painted in blues, reds, yellows or greens.