Kitchen Cabinets Portland CT | Vanities & Countertops

Kitchen Cabinets in Portland, CT

Portland sits directly across the Arrigoni Bridge from Middletown, and its housing still reflects the two industries that built the town: brownstone quarrying, which employed more than 1,500 men here by the 1850s, and the Gildersleeve shipyards before it.

Kitchen cabinets Portland CT homeowners need vary sharply from one street to the next. Above Main Street, along Marlborough Street and the roads running off it, stand the houses the quarry owners built for themselves between 1847 and 1900 — Greek Revival, Italianate, and the well-known pair of octagon houses. Main Street was the dividing line between the men who owned the quarries and the men who cut the stone, and the kitchens either side of it were built to entirely different specifications.

On the owners' side the ceilings are generous and the proportions formal, but the kitchen began as back-of-house service space, set behind the principal rooms and never meant to be seen. Opening one up means working around a chimney mass that takes a full run of usable wall out of the room, and around ceilings tall enough that a standard 30-inch upper stops short and leaves a bare strip of plaster above it. Stacked uppers, or carrying the run to the crown, puts that height to work.

Below Main Street and out toward Gildersleeve the stock is far smaller: cottages and multi-family houses the quarry companies put up for the Irish, Swedish and Italian labour they brought in, and shipyard housing older still. Footprints are tight, the original plaster is almost never true, and a run that measures clean on paper will meet half an inch of bow in the wall. Those kitchens get planned as sections, with filler and scribe agreed in advance, because there is nowhere on site to absorb the difference.