Before & After: A Small Swiss Kitchen Goes For The Gold

Hannah’s apartment is part of Olympics history! But while her home came with a very cool backstory it also brought along an outdated early 90s kitchen. With some trips to IKEA and a very accomodating landlord, Hannah now has a gold-medal-worthy place to eat her Wheaties.

From Hannah: My fiancé and I live in the French Alps in a small apartment. These apartments were originally built to house the press during the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. Thus, they weren’t designed to be used long-term or to even be very functional. Hence our green and pink 90’s kitchen!

The kitchen had a lot of “not-so-greats”. The tiles and green countertops – oh my! The stove burners had mixed up buttons, which lead to a melted teapot one day… Also, there was no oven. We had a “halogen oven” that functioned somewhat like a toaster oven – not ideal. Also, in a bit of irony our small refrigerator broke two days before renovation was going to start. We weren’t going to get a new one, but the timing worked out perfectly to get a full size one with a proper freezer.

As we rent this apartment, we were kind of stuck with it. But luckily our landlords were interested in updating our kitchen and we got to put our two cents into it all. VOILA! All of this is IKEA = good price, works well & looks great. We now owe our landlords a few cakes. 🙂