Discover the Story Behind this Boroughbridge Kitchen Showroom
From London to Boroughbridge…
The Kitchen Room launched on Fishergate in Boroughbridge in November 2025, and if you’ve been in, you’ll already know it doesn’t feel like a typical showroom. No laminated price lists. No commission-hungry salespeople hovering at your elbow. No fake discounts crossed out in red. Just beautifully considered kitchen displays, good coffee, and two founders who clearly care about what they’re doing. Getting here, though, took 12 years, a pandemic, and the realisation that London wasn’t where they wanted to raise a family.
Sam grew up in Harrogate, but Boroughbridge had become home in a different way. Her parents had moved there, her sister too, and her father had relocated his own business, from Leeds to the high street. She knew the town’s character, its community, and the kind of place it was.
But for over a decade, her life was in London. She and Hristiyan settled in Wandsworth, and they loved it. Sam built a career in PR, working across consumer brands. Hristiyan, originally from North Macedonia, had built his career working with a high-end bespoke furniture company whose client list included, at one point, the home of one of Britain’s most famous rock brothers. Owning a shop in a sleepy North Yorkshire market town was not exactly the plan.
Then Covid came, and something shifted. ‘It wasn’t one moment,’ Sam says. ‘But the city changed, and so did what we wanted from life. The community we’d had started to feel different. We started thinking about what we actually wanted the next chapter to look like.’
When Sam fell pregnant with their first son, the decision became clear. They moved north. Sam continued working, commuting to London while putting down roots in Yorkshire. Hristiyan, whose instinct has always been to make things with his hands, began working with local kitchen companies, then went self-employed, fitting kitchens and building furniture for private clients across the region. He saw the inside of a lot of Yorkshire homes, and he saw what the market was offering.
It wasn’t enough.
‘The gap was obvious once you started looking,’ Sam says. ‘On the high street you have big showrooms with permanent sales and product that doesn’t hold up. At the other end you have fully bespoke studios where the price point is out of reach for most people. There was nothing in the middle that offered genuine quality, genuine design expertise, and a process that actually felt personal.’
That observation, combined with Sam’s brand and client management background and Hristiyan’s practical expertise, became the blueprint for The Kitchen Room. The decision to commit wasn’t a quiet one – these two aren’t fainthearted. Sam was on maternity leave, midway through an interior design degree she had taken on to ‘fill her time’ when they signed the lease. Hristiyan was simultaneously project-managing and carrying out a complete renovation of their own home. It was, by any measure, a lot. But it also meant that when The Kitchen Room opened its doors, everything in it had been considered by people who were living and breathing design at every level.
They took a space on Fishergate, designed a showroom that felt like a home rather than a shop floor, and opened their doors. The space is small but considered, warm and unhurried, somewhere you can sit, handle samples, look through designs, and actually be listened to. Boroughbridge, which had no dedicated kitchen studio serving it or the surrounding villages, now had one.
For Hristiyan, the move turned out to be more of a homecoming than he expected. The wide skies and open landscape of North Yorkshire reminded him of Macedonia, a connection he hadn’t anticipated. He has embraced Yorkshire life wholeheartedly, and Yorkshire, it’s fair to say, has embraced him back. He’ll admit he still misses the sunshine, but the rest he wouldn’t change.
The ethos of The Kitchen Room is simple. Every project begins with a proper conversation, not a product pitch. Sam leads design and client relationships. Hristiyan leads installation. Between them, they cover the whole journey, from the first sketch to the final fitting. Clients talk about being guided through every decision, supported at every stage. ‘We’re not here to show off what we know,’ Sam says. ‘We’re here to listen to how you live.’
That means taking time, asking the right questions, and understanding how people actually use their home before a single door handle is chosen. It’s an approach that can’t be rushed, and can’t be faked.
Six months in, Sam and Hristiyan’s ambition for The Kitchen Room is straightforward: to become a genuinely trusted part of this community, the name that North Yorkshire homeowners reach for when they’re ready to do something they’ll love for the next 20 years. Making everyday spaces beautiful, one kitchen at a time.
