48 DESIGN CHICAGO THE MART designchicagomag.com S ome renovations start with a wish list. This one began with a Wild West kitchen that felt entirely out of place — the legacy of a previous owner who’d decorated it like a Yellowstone sound-stage. That was the first challenge facing designer John Cialone of Tom Stringer Design Partners when a longtime client family traded their city brownstone for a white-columned, federal-leaning house in Kenilworth, walking distance to the train and, from the curb, a dead ringer for an ambitious Cape Cod cottage. Inside, the Montana fantasy had none of the ease this young family of five was after—and Cialone already had a good sense of what that ease would look like for them. This was his third project for the couple. He’d designed their city apartment first, then a lake house north of town, so by the time this house came along, he knew how they lived. The three children are all budding gourmands, revering Chicago’s tasting-menu scene the way other kids talk baseball stats. “I feel like I know what they want before they say it,” Cialone says. It shows. The kitchen got the most drastic treatment: a near-total gut, with the old window—barely a window at all— blown wide open, so a corner that used to sit in shadow now gets afternoon light all day. That new light is part of what let the kitchen’s two shades of sage read true instead of gray, a distinction Cialone worried about