The warm and cozy kitchen has a treehouse vibe that’s easy to fall in love with.

Photo: Getty Images

If you’re anything like us, you watch episodes of Jennifer Garner’s #PretendCookingShow with your eyes peeled for glimpses of her gorgeous kitchen. Whether the actress is making an old family cornbread recipe or a yummy pan of baked oatmeal, her pretty wood cabinets and luxurious range tend to steal our attention. Luckily for us, Architectural Digest linked up with Garner to take a tour of her Los Angeles home, giving us an even closer look at that kitchen.

The house, which Garner had designed to her specifications, is chock-full of personal touches, including paintings by old friends, pieces of stained glass meant to evoke her West Virginia childhood, and even a part of the kitchen dedicated to baking. With its warm colors, soft textiles and casual farmhouse ambience, the cozy home is bound to offer some inspiration for just about anyone, whether you’re a serial redecorator or just looking to reorganize your kitchen.

Garner shows off her big kitchen pretty early in the tour, and she does it with lots of pride—mostly pride in how clean the counters are. “I’m so excited to show you my kitchen because, since the day I moved in, this is the first time ever that the counter’s been clean,” Garner says in the video. “Look! It’s never gonna look like this again. Please, memorialize this.”

While we can probably all relate to Garner’s usual kitchen clutter, it might be a little harder to relate to just how expansive her kitchen is. The room features both marble and soapstone countertops, an enormous island, a wood-burning fireplace with beautiful custom grates, a kitchen table and lots of storage. Garner also has a large range complete with a helpful pot-filling faucet.

Having the dining table right in the heart of the kitchen was a must for Garner, who says she hasn’t quite mastered the art of getting every part of dinner hot and ready at the same time.

“Here alone with my kids on a weekend, I cannot tell you how often I make something and I’m just feeding them as it comes off the stove,” Garner shares. “I’m not very good at things coming out of the oven or off the stove at the same time.”

Of course, no kitchen is complete without trusty tools, and some of Garner’s kitchenware is on display in the tour. She keeps a large dark blue Staub round cocotte out on her stove, and viewers can also spot a couple of pieces of pretty copper cookware on the counter, plus an assortment of wooden cooking utensils and some white serving bowls and plates for displaying fresh produce.

Another major must for Garner’s dream kitchen was an area dedicated to baking. One wall in Garner’s kitchen sports not only her oven and refrigerator, but also a small set of cabinets and drawers set aside for baking supplies. On the counter, Garner leaves out her KitchenAid stand mixer, jars of flour and other baking staples, a salt cellar and a baking scale. Having the baking ingredients set aside from everything else helps keep the pantry layout sorted in Garner’s head.

“It just makes it so much easier to have it all in one place and to know where your different flours are and your chocolate chips,” Garner says during the tour. “Chocolate chips are the most important thing in the whole house, and I could tell you where they are.”

For folks that prefer cooking to baking, Garner’s kitchen garden might be the star of the house. In the yard, Garner uses a gray water system to supply fruit trees and blueberry bushes with plenty of hydration, while a little screened-in vegetable house hosts even more goodies. For Garner, the rich garden is like having a little slice of her childhood a few steps away.

“I love that you can come out here in the middle of the summer and find a snack,” Garner shares. “Growing up the daughter of a farmer and having such connections to my family farm, it just truly thrills me so pretty much everything here is edible.”

The rows of green in the vegetable house are lined with dinosaur kale and fresh herbs—Garner says she’s especially fond of her thyme plants. Flowers that naturally repel pests are also planted throughout the veggie house so the Once Upon a Farm co-founder can keep her produce organic. Lavender, catnip and garlic are just some of your options for organic bug-proofing, and our sister publication Martha Stewart Living has even more suggestions to choose from.

Whether Garner’s AD tour inspires you to line the windowsill with herb plants, give your cabinets an overhaul or do some window shopping at your favorite home-goods store, a case of kitchen envy is probably heading your way. We just have one question: Now that we’ve had a tour of the house, can we finally get invited over for dinner?

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Source: Tampa Bay Times