Bestselling Cookbook Author Caroline Chambers Did Her Best to Speed-Reno Her Kitchen—With No Regrets

The Carmel Valley, California-based Caroline Chambers—food content creator, newsletter writer, and bestselling author of What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking (2024)—had just finished renovating a house in early 2025 with her husband George when a pregnancy with a fourth child hurled them into a whirlwind plan B. They decided to find a bigger place (they closed on a 100-year-old farmhouse last May), renovate it all summer, welcome the baby in July, and move in by September.

That plan, with its aggressive timeline, didn’t come to fruition. Instead, the home chef, who’s best known for making fast and adaptable meals, had to somewhat take a step back and let the planning and building of her new kitchen take the appropriate time it required. In September 2025, the family temporarily moved into the new property’s two small cottages—each parent took a cottage with two kids. Although Chambers describes the experience as "complete chaos for two and a half months," she says it was kismet that their new farmhouse came with two liveable cottages with kitchens, which is uncommon for the area. Many of their family meals during that time were simplified and involved a lot of grilling. Chambers also slowed down her work pace with her pregnancy.

The family of six officially moved into the main farmhouse in late November. The house wasn’t fully renovated at that point (construction was ongoing through December), but the kitchen was complete, and Chambers could finally make use of the most important room for her line of work. Even though her self-imposed September deadline wasn’t met, Chambers still acknowledges that, all things considered, the kitchen wrapped in a flash.

"My best friend Lily Wick is my designer, and if it wasn’t my best friend working with me, we never could have renovated the kitchen that fast," says Chambers. She remembers "pleading with my contractor to at least have the kitchen finished by late October," so that photos could be included in her second cookbook, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast, a new recipe collection out August 11, comprising of 15- and 30-minute meals and one chapter devoted to meals you can fully walk-away from. The book was written with busy parents in mind, who need to "make a lot of food fast for hungry children," says Chambers.

Speed was also the name of the game when it came to the kitchen renovation. Since it was the first major project, Chambers and Wick made important design decisions that invariably set the tone for the rest of the house. Inspiration emerged from Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, Chambers’ Southern upbringing, the color green, and an appreciation for antiques and handcrafted items. There were parts of the new kitchen design that felt like an intentional departure from her previous kitchen. "I went against how I think a great kitchen should be designed for creating content," Chambers says. "My old kitchen was perfect for content—the stove was on the island so I could set up a camera on the other side of the island and shoot across it and demo really well whatever I was cooking."

Now, her stove sits against a wall, which is more typical. Early on, Chambers considered an island stove for shooting purposes, but ultimately opted for a huge island instead, seeing the potential for it to become a central gathering area: someplace for the kids to not only eat at but sit on top of, that they could throw their backpacks onto, or where friends and guests could spread out for dinner parties and cocktails. "A stove in the middle of the island would interrupt all that, so I’ve adjusted to shooting the stove from the side and it’s working out just fine," she says. For how much of a time-crunch they were in, Chambers is thrilled with how her kitchen turned out, which blends old farmhouse charms with industrial modernity.

Install a secret bar

The original kitchen had three small closets next to each other. They kept one closet to stash cleaning supplies, but knocked down the other two closets to rebuild them as a pantry-bar hybrid. The bar, which tucks away behind a set of doors, has its own ice maker and beverage fridge. "I don’t like when bars are on display, but when we have company, we can open this up and have a full bar moment, which has come in handy because we have people over a lot," says Chambers.

Lean into island life