Long before Instagram I saved a lot of images of English inspired kitchens and “dining room libraries.”

But since we didn’t have the internet (LOL) I ripped them out of magazines and put them in a three ring notebook.

Anyone remember the ol’ days of ripping out magazine pages and saving them in a three ring notebook for inspiration? 

Those magazine tear outs are what helped me to design our first English style kitchen renovation (two decades ago) as well as what inspired our current one.

Never would I have imagined back then all the inspiration we’d have at our fingertips today. It is fun, but honestly, overwhelming. It was hard enough back then to make decisions!

So today I thought I would share a little about our two English style kitchens and book nooks (decades apart!).

I had some questions this week about the built in bookcases and banquette in our dining area so I thought it would be fun to share a little about how we did that, too.

Did you know our dining nook used to be where our kitchen was? 

When we moved in, that space looked like this. 

I originally only planned to do a cosmetic update here, but for many reasons I’ve shared in our renovation posts on The Inspired Room, we ended up swapping the kitchen and dining room.

That is what gave me the perfect excuse to create this “mini dining/ library book nook” made possible by squeezing in these small built ins on either side of the windows (we relocated the windows from the former dining room!).

To create this look we ordered the shelving units and the drawers below the banquette along with our kitchen cabinets.

Our contractors then assembled them together to create this built in!

The main objective here was to maximize space with the built in bench and gain storage with the drawers, so we decided to add these bookcases on the sides as an additional spot not only for the books, but to display smaller treasures.

Here is the “book nook” we added to our kitchen island. 

You can see I put book nooks, shelves and display areas everywhere I could! No regrets on that. Decorating them and collecting pretty things is fun for me.

I consider the style of our kitchen to be “English inspired.” I don’t know if that’s a perfectly accurate description, but whatever it is, it’s a style that has always inspired me.

Today people often say I have a Nancy Meyers inspired kitchen, and while I’m always honored by that, my style and kitchens were actually mostly inspired by magazines photos I saved in the 1900’s (LOL) and then early 2000’s. I have the magazine photos still in my notebook to prove it ha!

Here’s a quick peek at our English Tudor kitchen that we renovated in the early 2000’s (below).

Do you see the similarities to our current kitchen, above?

Anyone remember this photo? 

I really wanted to put wood counters like this in our current kitchen (which was one of our splurges in our other kitchen) but it just wasn’t working out.

But we did end up with soapstone on our current island, which we also had a tiny bit of in that English kitchen over by our stove!

Notice I also had a “book nook” in our island (and the toile, ha).

This home is where we lived when I started my blog wayyy back in summer 2007. I didn’t document the whole renovation since I wasn’t blogging during it then, but I did eventually share about the process and decisions we made later on The Inspired Room blog.

I would say the kitchen and these photos are why people started reading my blog! Everyone loved that kitchen and really loved the toile. I did, too!

The kitchen renovation in that English Tudor style home was done on a very limited budget trying to keep as much of the original kitchen as we could.

It was a total rat-infested disaster to begin with so it really was fun to make such drastic improvements while using a lot of what was already there.

A Tale of Two English Style Kitchens: The Renovation Posts

If you’d like to see some photos and some of my renovation tips from our other English Inspired kitchen, it’s an oldie but I think you would enjoy this post on our English Tudor Kitchen! It’s still timeless advice and fun to see the photos.

Plus, in that post, you can see my actual notebook and magazine tear outs plus I share some of how I used my inspiration photos and notebook to design the kitchen!

My, how inspiration gathering has changed with the advent of social media, but thankfully, this classic style remains.

And if you want to see our current kitchen before and afters you can find them here!.

Speaking of book nooks…if you missed my last post you can see My Favorite Coffee Table Books (+ Gift Ideas) here.

Today is the LAST day for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days!

I’ve rounded up all my favorite deals in my storefront, and you’ll see photos of items in my home on sale in this blog post.