Gail Simmons isn’t packing up her knives and going anytime soon. The Top Chef regular and her music executive husband, Jeremy Abrams, were days away from welcoming daughter Dahlia, 3, when they moved into to their Brooklyn home in December 2013. “Renovations began probably in May, right when I found out I was pregnant,” the Toronto native recalled. “It starts off just wanting to do superficial things, but you learn you need to do much more than that once you start tapping into everything in the house.”
Still, Simmons wouldn’t call the project a gut job. The main floor — “basically one giant room,” she described — encompasses the den, living room, dining room and kitchen, but the latter was the focus of the revamp. “We really did more to the kitchen than we did to the rest of the house.”
Aside from updating the look, her main concerns revolved around making the space more practical. “I knew the kitchen was going to be the workhorse for my recipes, my books, my job,” explained the Bringing It Home author. “I needed it to be really functional, usable and practical. I’m not a person who cares for the fancy stuff that you can’t use.”
Below, the Food & Wine editor walks Us Weekly through her “modern” space.