There’s no shortage of beautiful kitchens that only reach their full potential at the end of the year, when holiday parties and other festive gatherings push ranges and worktops to their limits. But the owners of one Virginia property had a specific vision: a light-filled entertaining pavilion, separate from their main house, that would come alive on weekends, with dueling chefs facing off to serve their family and friends. 

“The idea was that they’d do those events every Sunday evening,” says Charles Owen, proprietor of Owen Design Concepts, who was enlisted to turn this dream into a reality. “It’s called ‘warding away the Sunday blues,’” he adds with a chuckle.

The resulting 6,000-square-foot structure, which evokes images of conservatories and greenhouses one of the owners found online, has a distinctly old-world sensibility. The soaring space is made from stone, steel, and glass; some of its design details reference the Beaux Arts Musée d’Orsay, the former train station in Paris that now houses Impressionist works by Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. That meant the kitchen itself had to stand up to the building’s feeling of solidity and grandeur.

Fortunately, the clients had also come across the work of Officine Gullo in their hunt for inspiration. The Florentine company, which makes full kitchens from scratch in its Italian factories, struck the owners as the right partner—and not just because its historic aesthetic fit in with the rest of the building. (Gullo’s design team, for instance, suggested the matte-black joinery with bronze accents for a traditional tone.) Unlike other manufacturers, “the Officine Gullo guys are willing to make the entire kitchen,” Owen says. “They literally custom fabricate the sinks. They custom fabricate the doors for the Gaggenau refrigerators, the coffee machine… they even made a custom wine rack for us.”

These bespoke details unite the look and feel of the kitchen and frame the Italian operation’s calling card: fully integrated cooktops and ovens that sit within tailor-made all-metal cabinetry. At the heart of the space, two such ranges are situated back-to-back underneath a massive hood. The arrangement gives both dueling chefs access to built-in pasta cookers, as well as the coup de feu hobs you’d typically find only in a commercial kitchen. These large cast-iron eyes are hotter at the center and get cooler as you shift pots and pans outward, allowing a professional level of finesse with the slightest moves. The chef working on the left side of the kitchen, it should be noted, is closer to the built-in refrigerators and pizza oven, but the one on the right is closer to a large, hangar-style window that makes serving diners outdoors a breeze.

To allow the owners’ guests the opportunity to watch the chefs—and the kitchen—in action, Owen installed a 14-seat island just beyond the range complex, crowned by a butcher block made in Italy. The glass cabinets beneath it are lit from within and will house the couple’s collection of wine decanters when they’re not in use.

Though the project involved an international coalition of craftsmen and other professionals (the flooring is from Malta, sourced via Ancient Surfaces, for example, and the fireplace was hand-carved from limestone in the South of France), Owen says he was most impressed by how easy the Officine Gullo team made things. Not every kitchen manufacturer will send its own specialists abroad to ensure that the cabinets get positioned correctly. “It was an absolutely seamless operation,” he says, noting that this was his first time working with the firm. “From concept to delivery and installation, absolutely impeccable. Never seen anything like it.”

For Owen’s part, though, the real work may just be beginning. Asked whether he’d had the chance to duel in the kitchen yet, he says, “Actually, we’re about to. This Sunday, we’re going to break it in.” As for the food? “We’re going to keep it in the Italian vernacular. That’s going to be our start.”