New York Times-featured house in Salisbury is on kitchen tour Nov. 5

SALISBURY — This year’s kitchen tour for the Housatonic Musical Theatre Company at the high school offers a glimpse into a handwrought, high-design kitchen that was featured recently in The New York Times.Created by designers Robert Bristow and Pilar Proffitt for themselves and their three young children, the kitchen is an inviting mix of very intellectual and cool — and very accessible. This is a kitchen that tempts you to touch all the surfaces. The cabinet faces, for example, are all made out of heavy slabs of walnut — a wood that is rarely used in kitchens. It was an obvious choice for Bristow, however, because he uses it so often in the custom furniture that he designs and builds.“It’s a wood that looks good, it’s stable, it’s nice to work with,”Bristow said. “And we have a lot of it so it wasn’t expensive for us.”The money saved on the cabinets was used instead on luscious white marble for the counters; and chiseled, fat slabs of gray granite for the fireplace that separates the kitchen from the living room. Although the kitchen looks and feels indulgent, Proffitt and Bristow carefully made trade-offs and smart choices that allowed them to have a dream kitchen at a price that wasn’t a nightmare.The house itself was an experiment in finding a way to make ends meet — stylishly.Bristow and Proffitt, who met in architecture school and have worked together since they married in 1997, decided to move to the Northwest Corner and build their own house in about 2006, when they were expecting their third child. They bought land on Lime Rock Road in Salisbury that is surrounded by cornfields and horse barns.“First we designed the house we wanted,” Bristow said. They started collecting bids from contractors and builders and quickly found that the cost was prohibitive.They then decided to look at modular building units. Often people think they’ll save money by customizing modular house sections — and then discover that once they begin making extensive modifications to the basic package, the price creeps up pretty fast. Working with Bob Segalla at Segalla Turnkey Housing in North Canaan, however, Proffitt and Bristow found the opposite. They were in fact able to build the house they wanted for a price they could afford.It helped, of course, that their esthetic is stripped down and clean, inspired in part by the barns all around them on Lime Rock Road and also in part by the renovated cafeteria on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.“Everything is open,”Proffitt said. “You can see everything, all the ingredients.”And so, although there is ample closed storage, there are only a handful of upper cabinets in this kitchen.Mainly, the walls are lined with shelves holding tall, clear jars of kitchen staples.There is also no island storage because, surprisingly, there is no island in this kitchen. On an island, Proffitt noted, too often homework and papers and the debris of life accumulate, and get in the way of the cooking. In this kitchen, the centerpiece is a small round table, where the children do their homework every evening and where, during the day, bills can be paid and correspondence attended to.For the kitchen tour on Nov. 5, that table will also offer some edibles prepared by local chefs and restaurants; and lists of information on the vendors, products and workmen that helped this family bring its dream kitchen to life.Tickets for the Housatonic Musical Theatre Society Kitchen Tour on Nov. 5 are $35 in advance and $40 on the day of the tour. To find out where they can be purchased, and for descriptions of the eight other featured kitchens, go online to www.hmts.org.