2025 is a thrilling turning-point year for me, a real inflection point in my long career. For forty-five years I have worked at making state-of-the-art custom kitchens for amazing clients. Now with the launch of the Unfitted Kitchen collection, you finally do not have to be Sting to have one of my kitchens. And yes, Trudie and Sting were a wonderful couple to work for. I was intrigued also to also learn that Jennifer Aniston rented the house and brewed her coffee and made salads using Johnny Grey kitchen furniture and sat at my kitchen table.
There has been a long build up to my bringing out a range of furniture. I have considered it before and gone part way while designing for Smallbone, but this is the first proper launch. For decades instead I honed my skills and instincts on one-off kitchens and it was an exhilarating ride. Working for adventurous people at the top of whatever walk of life they had chosen brought me into the orbit of some extraordinary households. I became for a time almost a part of the family while taking in their needs and preferences. I learned so much.
Clients over the years have lived across the globe: in the UK, US, Australia including Hawaii, France, Italy, Switzerland, Cyprus, Ireland - and Mustique. Notting Hill in London has long been a hotspot for Johnny Grey custom kitchens, with at least ten completely bespoke projects installed there. Period townhouses with generous rooms make ideal spaces for large central islands, dining tables in the kitchen and storage neatly arranged in custom-built items of furniture. For these of projects we used cherry, walnut and sycamore figured veneers and inlays, as well as solid hardwoods. We pioneered end-grain chopping blocks, soft geometry, low level work surfaces for children, eye-focussed design, willow baskets and exciting colours, patterns and original artwork in the kitchen.
Another area where my kitchens seemed to go a bit viral is Tunbridge Wells. Here we were able to focus a lot on linking our new kitchen designs to clients’ beautiful gardens. We also designed a number of extensions to house the kitchens, making room for a sofa, pantry and utility room. For a financier and his family we built a central island in the shape of a high heeled shoe out of a single elm tree that had been stored in Wales since the 1970s.
Glasgow is the setting for a handful of ground breaking kitchens. A country house on the Clyde estuary had a disused servants’ quarters that we turned into a ‘drawing room-kitchen’ with panoramic views over the shoreline. We left the original cast iron silver safes with their heavy hinges in the space as a feature. The discovery of a flue enabled us to add a raised-height fireplaces to the kitchen scene. Other jobs in the city were a bit more regular but invariably involved pieces of furniture as the core of the design.
I have always loved working in America. Since The Art of Kitchen Design was published in the 1990s people were intrigued by the Unfitted Kitchen chapter, resulting in inquiries across the States. One client I worked for in London commissioned a kitchen in Greenwich Village, New York. The style of this was inspired by his interest in early twentieth century Russian art, so the kitchen had constructivist murals, rich cherry wood furniture and paintwork in glowing primary colours. In Palo Alto I worked for the family of a tech entrepreneur. This kitchen used concrete to reflect the shapes of the San Andreas Faultline. Then there was Mustique, where I worked on an elegant timber house, parts of which were made from a historic Bali courtyard home. The client who had bought this fantasy retreat from David Bowie wanted a kitchen, which the house did not have within it. I adapted one of the main rooms into a kitchen featuring a large peninsula and an intimate dining alcove with a view over the exotic gardens planted for Bowie. I also designed a garden kitchen in Bowie’s old studio, overlooking the sea.
But, as I said, you do not need to be a rock star or similar, to have a Johnny Grey kitchen any longer.
Now my furniture is being handmade in limited batches for economies of scale and the cost of a kitchen from the new Unfitted collection is pretty much like other quality offerings in the marketplace. In our workshops in Bruton, Salisbury and Kaunas, Lithuania, highly skilled makers use the latest craft manufacturing methods. The furniture components are shaped with computer-controlled flatbed cutting devices, with craftspeople focussing on assembly and finishing to the most exacting standards. This is a skilled and innovative process. It results in kitchen furniture you can use flexibly to create a space that is more friendly and inviting than a standard more fitted range of products. The effect is of a furnished room, a living room in which you cook and linger with your family and friends that happens to be the most pleasurable room in the house.
