While tending stock on the stove, Jan Buhrman is also chopping carrots, kale, and squash for two different soups. She checks on her homemade cheeses and decides to make harissa – a North African hot sauce – because she rediscovered some chipotles in the anarchy that is her spice drawer. “I hate feeling boxed in,” explains Jan, as she hand-washes some dishes.

The fact is, there is no boxing in Jan Buhrman. She’s a cook in motion – a study in efficiency and culinary prowess.

A private chef and full-service caterer on Martha’s Vineyard for close to twenty years, Jan knew what she wanted out of her home kitchen when she and her husband, builder Rich Osnoss, built their house in 1993. “I had a distinct advantage designing my own kitchen – I’ve worked in so many over the years. Some are really pretty but they lack functionality. I believe that the cook is the one who should design the kitchen, not an architect or the builder.”

On any given day in the life of Jan’s kitchen, Jan could be making an anytime-family-meal like pulled pork, or chicken and vegetables in a crock pot, while she’s baking bread, making sausage, or prepping for a casual pizza party for family, friends, and neighbors. She keeps her home cooking at home, and her catering cooking at her commercial kitchen. “It’s just easier that way,” she says. Jan has a way of making it all look easy.

The walk-in pantry that stores dry goods, pet food, and extra tableware complements her preference for below-counter storage, and helps keep the counters the way she likes them – free and clear of kitchen flotsam. A custom, three-compartment refrigerator with a top-mounted compressor is energy efficient and cheaper to maintain in the long run. It holds enough food for her family’s day-to-day. Extra cold storage stays in the basement.

Of the two sinks, one is kept primarily for food prep, the other – a twin basin – is for washing and drying dishes. “I hate the look of dishes out on the counter,” Jan says. The ingenious beauty of that sink lies in something else that’s not at first apparent. There are no handles on the faucet. Jan designed the sink with foot pedals, one hot, one cold, like on a sink you’d find in a hospital. An inspired solution, melding cleanliness and common sense, for this chef whose work-worn hands are proof of all the kneading, peeling, slicing, dicing, and dishwashing that they do.

If she could change one thing about her kitchen, she’d replace the faucet handles on the food-prep sink with foot pedals too. And if she could add more space to her kitchen, she would have a larder room for cold storage right off the pantry, like she’s seen in Europe on one of her many culinary adventures.
Waist-high slate counters and the granite island are built to suit the height of Jan’s knife-wielding hand and arm. A flat, wood-burning, cast-iron cook top, mortared on top of red brick, heats quickly and radiates warmth throughout the kitchen, so it’s only used in the winter months. There’s also a small pizza oven that Rich incorporated into the wood-burning furnace that heats their house.

Jan points out the amount of space between the expanse of the island and the bordering workspaces. “It was hard getting this right,” she says. “In some kitchens you spend all your time walking from one end to the other. . . . In others, you can’t even get past the dishwasher when its door is open.”

Because any kitchen, though especially this kitchen, inevitably becomes the vortex of every dinner party, Jan strove for a balance between having enough space without creating too much space for those wandering, well-intentioned guests-who-want-to-help-but-only-get-in-the-way. “I insisted we build this,” she says, thumping on a mini-slate islet that’s mounted just above the granite island. It’s set with two bar stools – on the dining room side of the kitchen.
“This gives people a place to be in the kitchen, drink their wine, eat, but there’s still some separation from the work of the kitchen,” Jan says. It’s a comfortable design solution that suits all, particularly the cook.

Looking out through two bays of north-facing windows, in a rare moment – a still moment – Jan watches her egg-laying chickens scratch and peck in the yard, and the family’s two pigs doing what pigs do. And Jan? Perhaps she’s pondering what she will do with them.