Breakfast Nooks

For a Southern California couple, architect Richard Landry created discrete structures to emulate the look of a small Italian village. The breakfast room’s ceiling and outer walls are glass. A French beaded-crystal chandelier is over a table whose base was made from a Portuguese giltwood Corinthian capital.

Designer Sandra Nunnerley worked with architect Arthur S. Pier to open up the living and dining rooms of a prewar Manhattan apartment for her clients, who wanted a more generous layout. Over the breakfast nook is Red Green Infusion by Jaq Chartier.

Martyn Lawrence-Bullard and Trip Haenisch, of Martynus-Tripp, created a European villa-style interior for a Los Angeles house designed by Harold Levitt in the early 1990s.

It’s chic and unassuming. In the kitchen, yellow fabrics animate a breakfast area centered around a 19th-century industrial steel table. The owner has children, and it’s easy to take care of.

“We created an old Andalusian atmosphere,” architect Richard Landry says of the Los Angeles house, he designed for Lorna Auerbach and her husband, Larry Wheat. The kitchen nook is a warm, casual dining area.

“When I first saw this apartment, I knew what needed to be done,” designer Mariette Himes Gomez says of her recently renovated residence in Manhattan. “We gutted it and reorganized the space. Now it’s like a loft.”

In Manhattan, Ike Kligerman Barkley renovated a 10-room apartment in a classic mid-20th-century Modern building for a couple and their four children. “The saltwater aquarium built into a wall of cabinetry is the focal point of the breakfast room,” John Ike says. The oak table and chairs, which have detailed carved motifs, are circa 1910 designs of Eliel Saarinen.

“It’s a comfortable house with a lot of visual interest,” Arthur Dunnam, of Jed Johnson Associates, says of a  Shingle Stye house on Long Island whose interiors he designed with his associate Andy Clark. “The breakfast room serves as a passageway. It’s the hub of the house,” says Dunnam.

The owners wanted the frankness of a Shope Reno Wharton exterior but more layers inside,” Greg Jordan says of a Shingle Style house he decorated on Long Island. A long, open kitchen ends in a round breakfast room with a soaring ceiling. Jordan chose 19th-century antiques, such as the country French armchairs and the iron chandelier. The blue-and-white platters are English stoneware.