Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane are passionate about food.
When they aren’t selling it at , their popular duo of stores, they are cooking it, eating it or talking about it.
“Food is central to our lives,” Marczyk said on a recent afternoon. “It’s not just what you cook and how you cook it and the food’s provenance, but talking about it.”
To that end, and Macfarlane have created a dream kitchen in their rambling house in Denver’s Hilltop neighborhood. It covers about 500 square feet — more than some apartments. The space is light and airy and tricked out with restaurant-grade appliances that would be the envy of many professional chefs.
Macfarlane and Marczyk, who share the house with their 13-year-old son Kaz, bought the property in 1998, the year after they married. Their real estate agent discouraged them in a big way, what with the hard use the house had suffered. It was in sad shape and outdated on many levels, but still had good bones and exuded charm.
Beyond that, the price was right, and they were both willing and able to put some sweat equity into fixing it up, which began soon after they moved in.
The rambling house was built in the late 1880s on a half-acre lot at the corner of a fruit orchard. Those trees are long gone, but Marczyk planted several cherry and plum trees a few years ago for jams that they process and jar. There is a beehive, too.
And the kitchen itself is a beehive of sorts.
“The specialness of this kitchen is related to its sheer volume,” Marczyk said. “It’s essentially our family room.”
The room is anchored by a central, sweeping prep island topped with , an engineered surface of Portland cement and silica sand that is super-sturdy, 40 percent lighter than natural stone and far less costly than many other options.
“When they pull me out of this house feet-first, I know someone will come in and replace it with granite countertops,” Marczyk said, running his hand over the black slab. “But I love it. This is something you’d find in a chemistry lab. I can roll dough on it, scrub it, re-oil it and it’s ready to go. It’s pretty wash-and-wear. I love it.”
The centerpiece appliances that visiting cooks swoon over are the cooktop and side-by-side ovens.
Gas-fueled and made by Imperial, a commercial manufacturer that introduced a heavy-duty residential line around the time Marczyk and Macfarlane began shopping for their kitchen, they are a massive stainless-steel set-up.
Atop the ovens, which are simple, no-frills “hot boxes,” as Marczyk puts it, sit six gas burners on a continuous iron grid, plus a four-foot-square flat-top. The latter is a steel surface for griddling items such as pancakes and sandwiches.
The range itself gets cooks salivating. The hottest burner blasts an 11-inch flame pulsing at 30,000 BTUs — an amount of heat that puts it squarely in commercial wok territory. (The heavy-duty burner on an average home’s gas range runs about 14,000 BTUs.)
Marczyk and Macfarlane pretty much thought of everything in the design, which they did in collaboration with . A coiled metal hose hangs to the left of the cooktop so pots can be filled with water right where they will be set aboil, avoiding the schlep from the sink.
Since the ovens don’t have broilers, the couple invested in a salamander, a hanging unit with a lever that slides out a retractable tray. The devices are common in restaurants but virtually unknown in homes.
An industrial-grade hood sits atop the cooking units to vent directly into a large duct on the roof.
“I don’t like food odors in the house when I’m eating,” Marczyk said. “Bacon, fish, even burnt butter. Can’t do it.
“Another thing I like?” Marczyk added with a grin. “That hood will suck your toupee off. And I mean that. If you’re wearing a wig, don’t stand underneath it when it’s going full blast.”
A stainless steel Sub-Zero refrigerator sits beside a two-drawer freezer, which is fronted with the same cherry panels used in the cabinetry.
The twin main sinks are beneath a window looking out into the side yard. The largest is 14 inches deep. “The great thing about it is that after a party, you can put all your dirty dishes in there until the next morning and no one sees them in the sink,” Macfarlane said. “Dirty dishes? Where?”
There is also a prep sink in the central island, and a bar sink flanked by an ice maker.
The double-stack dishwasher is by Fisher & Paykel, a New Zealand-based appliance company that has corraled a respectable share of the U.S. market during the past 20 years.
“All this was sort of cobbled together,” Marczyk said of the mix of appliance brands. “It’s just very functional to cook in here. It’s easy to cook for two, easy to cook for 20.”
In addition to practicality, history abounds in this kitchen.
On a recent afternoon, Marczyk produced a knife and handed it to a guest. It was about 10 inches long, with a full tang and an ebony handle. It had some staining on it, so it was obviously carbon steel, and the blade was razor sharp.
“What do you notice about the label?” he asked. Stamped into the blade was “F. Dick. Germany.”
“Whoa,” the visitor replied. “It says ‘Germany,’ not ‘West Germany.’ “
“That’s right,” Marczyk said. “And this isn’t post-unification. This is a pre-World War II chef’s knife.”
The kitchen floor is original to the house, made of some type of ultra-dense, tropical mahogany that has stood up to well over a century of wear. “It might not be the most politically-correct wood in the world these says,” Marczyk concedes. But it gives the large space a homey, grounded feel.
“We cook and eat here at least six nights a week,” Marczyk said. “Nothing is for show. It’s all super-utilitarian and I always know where everything is, right down to the cutting boards and poultry twine.”
The biggest dinner party that Marczyk personally handled all the cooking for in his home saw about 20 people at the table. But the biggest one he has hosted was for nearly four times that many — and it was a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
“It was a slow-food event that we were going to host at the market, but we lost power,” he said. “So we had to move it to here. The centerpiece was whole striped bass baked in a shell of salt crust. There were four big fish. I want to say it was for 75 people.”
It took a year to complete the kitchen remodel, and the couple says there was some wrangling with the contractor at times.
“Oh my goodness, it lived up to all the stories you hear about remodeling,” Macfarlane said. But eventually, the couple got their dream kitchen.
“I really can’t think of anything I’d change about it,” Marczyk said.
William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/williamporterdp
