Kitchen Remodeling in Harwich, MA

Harwich Port, Harwich Center, East and West Harwich — kitchens designed for how you'll use them in ten years, not just next summer.

Harwich covers a lot of ground and a lot of different kinds of housing. Harwich Port along Route 28 has its shingled summer houses and the three harbours — Wychmere, Saquatucket and Allen. Harwich Center holds older houses around the common and Brooks Academy. East Harwich, up toward Route 137 and Pleasant Bay, has newer subdivisions and condominium developments. West and South Harwich run down toward Nantucket Sound. And threaded through all of it are the cranberry bogs that gave the town its claim as the birthplace of commercial cranberry cultivation back in the 1840s.

What ties Harwich together for our purposes is that it has one of the stronger year-round populations on the Lower Cape, including a large number of homeowners who are in the house they intend to stay in. That changes what a good kitchen looks like. On Cape Kitchens has been designing and building here for over 30 years from our North Eastham showroom, and Harwich is the town where we most often design for the next twenty years rather than the next five.

Owner and designer Vern Hatt is a Massachusetts licensed and insured contractor (Construction Supervisor License #CS62739, Home Improvement Contractor License #177590), and he runs each Harwich project himself from design through installation.

A great deal of what gets marketed as 'accessible design' looks institutional. It does not have to. Most of the changes that make a kitchen genuinely easier to use as you get older are invisible in photographs and cost little or nothing extra if they are decided at the design stage rather than retrofitted later.

• Drawers instead of base cabinets. This is the single highest-value change we make. Deep drawers bring pots and pans to you instead of asking you to kneel and reach into a dark box. On a Harwich remodel we will often specify drawer bases throughout the lower run.
• Pull-out pantry and corner solutions so nothing lives permanently in the unreachable back corner.
• A wall oven at counter height rather than a range, so a heavy roasting pan never has to be lifted from floor level.
• Lever handles and D-pulls rather than knobs, which are markedly harder to use with arthritic hands.
• Serious task lighting. Vision at seventy needs roughly three times the light it did at thirty. Under-cabinet LED on every work surface is not a luxury item.
• Wider aisle clearances — forty-two to forty-eight inches — which also happens to make the kitchen better for two cooks today.
• Contrast between counter and floor edges, which helps depth perception considerably and reads as a design choice rather than an accommodation.

None of this makes a kitchen look clinical. It makes it look like a well-designed kitchen, which is what it is.

Harwich has a local historic district operating under Chapter 40C of Massachusetts General Law. As with every 40C district, review applies to exterior alterations visible from a public way — not to interior work. Your cabinets, counters, appliances and layout are entirely your own business. A new window over the sink, a changed door, or an exterior vent termination on a house inside the district is a different matter and needs a certificate before the building permit issues.

If your Harwich property is in the district, we design with that in mind and factor the review into the schedule. Most of our Harwich kitchen projects never touch the exterior at all.

Consultations are free, whether at your Harwich home or at our showroom at Unit #7, 4250 State Highway in North Eastham, next to Ace Hardware. Bring photos and measurements if you have them; if you do not, we will take them.

Or send us an email to schedule  ·  Monday–Friday 8:00 AM–5:00 PM, Saturday by appointment