Catering to their needs

Local foodies and caterers Ben Meel and Shatika Woolman recently shared how their love of food influenced the design of their Summit Homes build. Their stunning kitchen now provides the perfect setting to inspire new sweet and savoury recipes for their bruschetta creations.

How did you find the experience of building for the first time?

We decided to build as we were very fortunate to receive a piece of land that Ben’s grandad bought and built on in the 1950s. Ben grew up visiting the house most Sundays for a roast dinner. We later lived there for a few years after Ben’s grandad passed, before the house sadly got knocked down.

This was our first time building and we feel so grateful we got to build such a beautiful home. Most things throughout the build ran smoothly and seamlessly. It felt good leaving our home in such capable hands.

We spent a lot of time in the initial planning stage, with lots of changes made to our design to make sure we were happy with the final product.

We’ve been in our home for approximately 18 months now and we absolutely love it.

Overall, we’re extremely happy with everything and if we could go back and do it again there would be very few things we would change.

What was the most important thing you wanted to achieve with your new home?

The most important things to us were natural light and a large kitchen being the heart of the home.

We wanted to bring the outside in with lots of windows and open living areas, and we loved the Australiana display home because of the large windows at the front (we have a north-facing block) and how the home wraps around the garden with windows all around.

Whilst we also wanted to consider passive-solar design principles in our build, we consciously chose to keep all the west-facing glazing for the view of the garden and the beautiful sunsets every evening.

Why was a spacious kitchen important to you?

Our home design was always going to be focused around a large, open-plan kitchen.

Our reasons for this are a love of cooking and entertaining for family.

Inevitability, when these two things combine everyone congregates around the kitchen, so it’s great that we have the space to accommodate this.

When we first had a solid business concept in mind we assumed we would run it from home, as we have the absolute perfect kitchen for it.

We were very disappointed to hear we needed to be in a commercial kitchen – not only is it more expensive, but a fraction of the size.

How did you decide on the right builder for you?

We visited hundreds of display homes before sitting down with a builder.

The very first display home we went into was a Summit home, and we always loved them when we walked into them; they all had a distinct feel and we knew we were in a Summit home even if we didn’t see the sign.

After eventually settling on a couple of display home layouts – the Australiana by Summit and one by another builder – we sat down with each builder respectively.

We quickly made the decision that Summit was for us, as they got straight down to work on our plans, talking about how the layout could be optimised for us.

CONTACT Summit Homes, 9317 0141, www.summithomes.com.au