Foodies and caterers, Ben & Shatika of STACK’D KITCHEN, recently shared how their love of food influenced the design of their new Summit home. Their stunning kitchen now provides the perfect setting to inspire new sweet and savoury recipes for their bruschetta creations.

Tell us a bit about your new home. Was this your first time building and how did you find the experience?

We decided to build as we were very fortunate to receive a piece of land that Ben’s grandad bought and built on in the 1950s. Ben grew up visiting the house most Sundays for a roast dinner before Ben and Shatika later lived there for a few years after he passed before it sadly got knocked down.

This was our first time building and we feel so grateful we got to build such a beautiful home. Summit were great to deal with. Most things throughout the build ran smoothly and seamlessly. Felt good leaving our home in such capable hands, especially our building supervisor, Brendan Shugg.

We’ve been in our home for approximately 18 months now and we absolutely love it! Overall, we’re extremely happy with everything and if we could go back and do it again there would be very few things we would change.

What was the most important thing that you wanted to achieve with your new home?

The most important things to us were natural light and a large kitchen being the heart of the home. We wanted to bring the outside-in with lots of windows and open living areas. We loved the Australiana display home because of the large windows at the front of the home (we have a north facing block) and how the home wraps around the garden with windows all around. Whilst we also wanted to consider passive-solar design principles in our build, we consciously chose to keep all the West-facing glazing for the view of the garden and the beautiful sunsets every evening.

How did your catering business, STACK’D KITCHEN, influence the design of your new home?

The business itself didn’t impact the design as it wasn’t an idea yet, however, our home design was always going to be focused around a large, open plan kitchen. Our reasons for this are a love of cooking and entertaining for family; inevitability when these two things combine everyone congregates around the kitchen so it’s great that we have the space to accommodate this.

When we first had a solid business concept in mind we assumed we would run it from home, as we have the absolute perfect kitchen for it! We were very disappointed to hear we needed to be in a commercial kitchen (not only is it more expensive, but a fraction of the size!).

Overall, how was your experience with Summit Homes?

We are very happy with the final result of our build, though that’s not to say there weren’t any hiccups along the way (as to be expected with most builds we would imagine). We spent a lot of time in the initial planning stage, with lots of changes made to our design to make sure we were happy with the final product.

The highlight of the process for us was going to site – not just because we got to see our home come to life, but because of our amazing construction supervisor, Brendan. We loved his weekly email updates, his accommodations for us to check out the progress VERY frequently, and his exceptional attention to detail at our PCI picking up things that were so minor and unnoticeable to us! 

How did you hear about Summit? And how did you decide Summit was the right builder for you?

We visited (literally) hundreds of display homes before sitting down with a builder. The very first display home we went into was a Summit home, and we always loved them when we walked into them; they all had a distinct feel and we knew we were in a Summit home even if we didn’t see the sign.

After eventually settling on a couple of display home layouts, the Australiana by Summit and another builder, we sat down with each builder respectively. We quickly made the decision that Summit was for us as you got straight down to work on our plans, talking about how the layout could be optimised for us, rather than wasting an hour of our time (other builder) boasting about all their building awards and never putting pen to paper.

Would you recommend Summit to your friends and family?

Absolutely. We would (and have) recommended Summit to anyone looking to build. Although we have not had the experience of building with anyone else, we were happy with the service and the final outcome.

If you would like to find out more about Ben & Shatika’s bruschetta creations, visit stackdkitchen.com.au or follow STACK’D KITCHEN on Instagram @stackd.kitchen and Facebook @stackdkitchen.