John Reese Wilkins, (1918-2006) a home remodeling innovator and design pioneer.

Custom Kitchens was founded by John Reese Wilkins in 1950. His showroom on Telegraph Avenue opened in the summer of that year and is still open today. After serving in the Navy in WWII, John became an Oakland fireman. While struggling to support his growing family, John took on side jobs as a carpenter building homes in the post war San Francisco area housing boom and suddenly discovered his passion for building and designing. Working with his 2 uncles, who were in the cabinet sales business, he began to see a growing potential for kitchen and bathroom specialization. John took a chance, left his job at the fire department and Custom Kitchens was born.

During the 1950’s and early 60’s, there were no real sensible standards or guide lines for kitchen and bathroom design for the new modern era or our west coast lifestyle. Many homes had features common to Midwestern life where seasonal food storage and food preparation ergonomics revolved around farming. Having been raised as a child in Idaho, John recognized the San Francisco area lifestyle was different. Fruits, vegetables, bread all were readily available. People were beginning to use the Kitchen as a gathering place for the family and friends. He recognized that more room was needed in the kitchen. He removed walls and expanded spaces for his clients. This often involved room additions to the home. He researched the new kitchen appliances and sold the first dishwashers, garbage disposers and built-in refrigerators. He brought in to the home commercial style cooking appliances and recognized early on the need for things like proper ventilation and work areas for additional help in the kitchen. When the microwave oven came on the market in the 1960’s, he wanted it off the countertop. Many credit him for his own clever version of the “built in” microwave.

In the bathroom, John Wilkins recognized that Mom and Dad needed their own space and convinced his clients to expand their Master Bedrooms to create the Master Bedroom Suite with a separate bathtub and shower area and a separate room for the toilet. Storage cabinetry for personal items in the bathroom was becoming more of a trend. Adequate cabinetry for the bathroom was not available on the market and most contained features that were not to John’s liking. Vanity cabinets where so short most people had to bend over to use them and the pre manufactured medicine cabinets of the day were small, shallow and there was not much to choose from. So in1958, John Wilkins started his own cabinet shop to build his own medicine cabinets and bathroom vanity cabinets. The word spread, his business expanded and soon he was building his own innovative kitchen cabinetry as well.

By the end of the 1960’s, Custom Kitchens by John Wilkins Inc. had become a household name in the San Francisco Bay area. By the late 1970’s Custom Kitchens by John Wilkins inc. had become nationally recognized with projects being featured in such publications as Better Homes and Gardens and Architectural Digest. John’s clients were opening their homes up to public view for charitable organizations and photography for national brand advertizing. John Wilkins continued operating Custom Kitchens until 1990 when he sold the company to his son Jerry Wilkins and Jerry’s wife, Joy Wilkins. John then retired and move back to Idaho where he grew up as a child. While in Idaho he built several homes on ranch property he had purchased in the early 1970’s. In 2006, John Wilkins passed away quietly just after putting the final touches on his own new home in Hagerman, Idaho. He just could never stop.