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Most kitchen designers in Kansas City will show you a plan. Karin Ross will tell you when your plan is wrong.
You work directly with Karin, a senior designer with more than 25 years in this metro, an NKBA-listed professional and a multi-year Guildmaster winner. Her signature is clean, elegant, and transitional, with genuine European roots. Every drawing, every cabinet, every countertop, and every finish is chosen with you, in the room, before anything is ordered.
Design is the part that happens before anyone orders anything. Where the range goes, whether the wall can come down, and how wide the walkway between the island and the sink run needs to be for two people to work in the room at once.
Finishes come later, and they are the easy part. The decisions that are expensive to reverse are the ones made on paper, which is why the design phase takes longer than most people expect and why it is where the budget gets protected.
Karin Ross has spent more than 25 years designing kitchens and bathrooms in this metro and building new homes from scratch. She is an NKBA-listed professional, a multi-year Guildmaster winner, and has been featured in Kansas City Homes & Style, IN Kansas City Magazine, and on KCTV5.
Karin Ross Designs is family-owned. You are not handed to a junior. You work with Karin.
Her style is clean, elegant, and transitional, with authentic European influence. Not borrowed from a magazine. She is European.
The slogan has not changed in 25 years: elegant, but functional.
Large firms are built around volume. Small firms are built around a designer.
When you choose a design firm, you are choosing a specific person’s eye, because you saw their work and it was the work you wanted. Most good design firms are small for that reason. One to five designers, working closely, sharing a style.
That is what you get here. The person whose portfolio you looked at is the person who designs your kitchen.
Our kitchen design services cover every decision that gets made before a single cabinet is ordered.
Spatial Planning
The layout comes first. We plan the room around how you cook, store, and move through it, not around where the old cabinets happened to sit.
Cabinets and Countertops
Chosen together, never one after the other. This is where we mix and match, so you can splurge on the countertop and save on the tile.
Kitchen Flooring
Selected to work with the cabinets and the rest of the house. See our guide to kitchen flooring options.
Color Palettes
Coordinated across the whole room, and against what the kitchen opens onto. A kitchen that fights the rooms next to it never settles.
Lighting Design
Layered, on dimmers, with task lighting where you actually work. Under cabinet lighting is the upgrade clients notice most and ask for least.
Fixtures and Appliances
Specified early, because appliance sizes drive cabinet sizes. Keep finishes consistent. Continuity is what makes a kitchen look considered.
Painting
Interior painting handled in-house, so the kitchen is finished when we leave it.
If you want the build handled too, that is kitchen remodeling in Kansas City, where the design and the construction come from one team.
So, can you design your kitchen on your own?
The simple and honest answer is NO.
You know your kitchen. That is not the same as seeing what it could be. A trained eye gets you there without giving up comfort or blowing the budget.
There is a money argument too. Designers look at new products constantly, so we know what exists and what it costs. Tell us how you actually use the room, and you get real options across colors, textures, and price points.
We mix and match, so you can splurge on the countertop and save on the tile.
Modern kitchen design has moved on from the all-white kitchen. Clean lines, black hardware, quartz doing the heavy lifting, a waterfall edge on the island, open shelving where it earns its place.
That is one direction. Karin’s signature is transitional with authentic European influence. Clients often arrive having fallen for something they saw in Europe, wanting to know if it will work in a house in Leawood. Usually it will, with adjustments.
Contemporary or traditional, both are good answers. The wrong answer is a kitchen that does not match the rest of your house.
The smaller the room, the more the drawing matters. There is no slack in a ten-by-twelve kitchen, so scale, sightlines, and where the storage goes all get settled on paper before anything is ordered. Our ASID Heartland Design Award was for a kitchen under 300 square feet.
Here is how that plays out on site: small kitchen remodeling in Kansas City
Every trend on this page will date. That is what trends do.
The goal is to buy the kitchen once. Changing a backsplash in five years is fine. Rebuilding because the layout was wrong is not, and that is the expensive mistake we are here to prevent.
So we design for how you live, then let the finishes carry the fashion. Do not spend big out of boredom. Spend with a purpose, and the kitchen will still work in ten years.
If you are comparing interior kitchen designers, these are the things worth checking:
And the thing most people find out too late: ask whether the designer and the builder are the same team. That one answer shapes your entire experience.
Before we draw anything, we want to know what is not working, what matters most, and what you want the room to feel like when it is finished. Not measurements. Those come later.
A first plan, then a better one. A custom kitchen takes discussion and adjustment, and the plan gets stronger as we go. A few photos and a quick layout will not produce a kitchen that fits your routine, which is why big box plans miss the things that matter most.
Cabinets, countertops, flooring, color, lighting, fixtures. You are in the room for these, seeing and touching what you are choosing. You find out whether something works before it is installed, not after. That is what the trained eye is for.
Everything locked before anything is ordered. This is the phase that protects your budget.
It takes longer than people expect, and that is deliberate. The design phase is where the money gets saved.
We design kitchens across the Kansas City metro:
Overland Park · Leawood · Prairie Village · Lee’s Summit · Olathe · Blue Springs · Independence · Mission · Kansas City
A contractor builds what is drawn. A designer decides what gets drawn. If the layout is already right and you only need it built, you may not need a designer. If you are not sure the layout is right, that is exactly what a designer is for.
Talk to us about what you need. Designing and building under one roof is how we usually work, and it is why nothing gets lost between the drawing and the site.
Longer than people expect, and that is deliberate. A good plan takes discussion, discovery, and adjustment. A few photos and a quick layout will not produce a kitchen that fits your routine. The design phase is also where the budget gets protected.
Spatial planning, cabinets, countertops, flooring, color palette, lighting, fixtures, and appliances. In short, everything that has to be right before anyone starts building.
Everything from modern kitchen design with clean lines and black hardware to warm, traditional, and transitional rooms. Karin’s own signature is transitional with European influence.
You do not need to know what you want yet. That is what the first conversation is for.
To work with kitchen designers in Kansas City who will tell you honestly what will and will not work, call (816) 425-2815 or book your free consultation today.
Award-Winning Interior Design Craftsmanship at Your Service!
Karin Ross Designs was recently featured as an interior designer in IN Kansas City Magazine.
Kitchen Remodel, Less than 300 sq. ft - BRONZE AWARD WINNER
Bathroom Remodel, Less than 150 sq. ft. - BRONZE AWARD WINNER
Karin Ross Designs was recently featured as a KCHS Stylemaker
