Award-winning kitchens come in all sizes, styles and colors. They can be as small as a galley or as palatial as a ballroom, as long as they meet the needs of the homeowner in unique ways. This means the space provides a place to cook, gather, dine and entertain. Some include pantries, breakfast bars, or home office nooks with charging stations. Award-wining kitchen designers often start a project with extensive research into the lifestyle of the family that will spend time in the kitchen. How many people will use the kitchen? Do they entertain often? Do the homeowners work outside the home, do they have children and what ages? How much storage do they currently require? What do they like to cook? Is wine storage and preservation a key element in their entertaining? Many award-winning designers will recommend that homeowners start their kitchen dreaming by researching appliances. A significant amount of your investment will go toward appliances and selecting appliances first helps to define the layout and style of your kitchen.
Clarke, New England’s Official Sub-Zero, Wolf and Cove Showrooms, are often the first stop when designing an award-winning kitchen. “Homeowners love to browse in Clarke’s Showrooms with their designer,” explains Clarke Corporate Showroom Director Marco Barallon. “We showcase dozens of kitchens in our award-winning showrooms in Boston Seaport, Milford Massachusetts, and South Norwalk, Connecticut.”
Each kitchen display has a unique style and exemplifies how world-class appliances will look and function in your home. You can tour the showroom with one of Clarke’s showroom consultants and have all your questions answered. “We’ve had numerous homeowners tell us that spending one hour in a Clarke Showroom was more valuable that months of their own research,” says Sean Clarke, president of the eponymous company. “We don’t sell anything in our showrooms, so there is no pressure to buy anything. We are simply a brand ambassador for Sub-Zero, Wolf and Cove appliances. If you would like to make a purchase after touring Clarke, we will connect you with a trusted retail dealer in your area.”
Test Driving Appliances is a Clarke Hallmark
When Tom Clarke opened New England’s first Sub-Zero showroom in 1991, he realized how important it was for homeowners to interact with these high-end appliances in order to appreciate their quality and the many benefits they offer. For the past 34 years, Clarke has helped New Englanders outfit award-winning kitchens starting with a showroom visit including seeing the appliances in action. Now his son Sean Clarke is president of the company, and he carries on the tradition of inviting design professionals and homeowners to the showrooms, where they can participate in an Appliance Demonstration or a Test Drive with a Clarke chef.
Some visitors are avid bakers and accomplished chefs and need to actually cook with various appliances to make an educated choice for what would work best for their needs. Since working appliances are not the norm in appliance stores, Clarke’s three award-winning showrooms are unique. According to Clarke’s Boston Showroom Manager Jeremy McCulla, “We’ve had homeowners come in with baking pans and recipe ingredients and ask to use a variety of Wolf ovens to select the model that will work best for their baking needs. We welcome this kind of experimentation, and our in-house chefs will help them compare a convection oven versus a convection steam oven or a speed oven.”
Award-Winning Kitchen Designers Love Sub-Zero, Wolf and Cove
Dozens of architects including Patrick Ahearn of Patrick Ahearn Architect and David Hacin of Hacin often send homeowners to a Clarke Showroom to get a sense of size and scale when designing a kitchen for an iconic home. More than a hundred award-winning kitchen designers including Donna Venegas of Venegas and Company, Kathy Marshall of Kathy Marshall Design and Veronica Campbell of Deane Inc. also rely on Clarke to help their clients select the appliances that will make their lives easier and make their kitchens both beautiful and functional. In fact, you can find a gallery of award-winning kitchens on Clarke’s website.
Clarke and Sub-Zero, Wolf and Cove Reward Great Kitchen Designers
Sub-Zero, Wolf and Cove, along with their New England distributor Clarke, hold kitchen design awards every two years. The current Kitchen Design Contest is underway with the last date to enter being January 31, 2026. This gives designers currently working on award-winning designs plenty of time to submit their entries.
In 2012, Karen Swanson, Owner of New England Design Works in Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts, became an award-winning kitchen designer when a challenging Boston kitchen she remodeled earned her the New England regional design award in the Sub-Zero and Wolf Kitchen Design Contest. A decade later, she became a national finalist in Sub-Zero and Wolf’s 2022-23 Kitchen Design contest for another Boston project. Like others who have designed award-winning kitchens over the past three decades, Swanson has been featured in regional and national magazines and websites inspiring other designers and homeowners to create stunning kitchens that show a wide range of styles anchored by high-performance appliances and handcrafted cabinetry.
Learn More About How to Create an Award-Winning Kitchen at Clarke
The first step to an award-winning kitchen is to schedule a pressure-free, inspiring appointment at Clarke. At a Clarke Showroom you can explore a wide variety of full-scale kitchens designed by the region’s finest designers, learn about the appliances and where you can purchase them, as well as find trusted resources including architects, kitchen designers, stone and cabinet experts and many others. Clarke doesn’t sell anything, so there is never any pressure to buy; they are a luxury appliance brand ambassador and kitchen concierge, helping New Englanders who want to create the kitchen of their dreams.