With a newly vamped-up image, sporting straight hair and rocker bangs on her new album, Dark Hope, classical opera singer Renée Fleming has embarked on new ventures in her professional as well as personal life. The Grammy Award-winning soprano, most known for her renditions of Mozart and Verdi, recently released her first pop/rock album with covers of Peter Gabriel, Leonard Cohen, and Death Cab for Cutie songs. Now, after a three-year renovation, her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has also undergone a makeover. Fleming says with a little help from her friends at SieMatic and Miele, her newly finished kitchen is hitting all the right notes.

“I was really looking for a contemporary feel, perfect for the style of my apartment and also for the city landscape that I live in,” Fleming says.

During the time her home was being renovated, Fleming, who has been called “the people’s diva,” was featured on the televised We are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial concert for President Obama, performed for the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace, and became the first woman in the 125-year history of the Metropolitan Opera to headline an opening night gala solo. Needless to say, her schedule was quite full. But even with a full plate, Fleming had no problem collaborating with interior designer Marina Lanina of David Kleinberg Design Associates and SieMatic’s National Design Director Susan Smart on the kitchen makeover.

While Fleming’s mandate was to create a beautiful kitchen, the end result is a very ecofriendly and high-performance room. The partners she chose—SieMatic and Miele—have exemplary sustainability practices and products. SieMatic, a Forest Stewardship Council-certified company that works under a “zero waste” mandate, converting waste to zero-emission energy, will help lower anyone’s carbon footprint. Miele’s resource-saving appliances have won numerous design and efficiency awards.

This new green kitchen complements the lifestyle choices made by Fleming and her daughters, 14-year-old Sage and 17-year-old Amelia.

“A lot of things I do were drilled into me as a child, and they turned out to be very useful,” Fleming says. Her father, passionate about environmental conservation, had a profound influence on Fleming growing up and surrounded her with this ethic. Despite the amount of travel the three-time Grammy winner does, from Stockholm to London, Toronto to Chicago, or right in her own backyard to the Metropolitan Opera, she makes a conscious effort to behave in a hotel as she would at home, by conserving water and electricity, she says.

Now adding to this lifestyle is a newly laid-out kitchen. Smart designed it masterfully, taking a small space and transforming it into a perfectly functional work and storage space, while optimizing every inch available. This type of design played to SieMatic’s strengths as a company that specializes in space-saving accessories and ecofriendly design.

Suited with tons of counter space and ample storage, two of Fleming’s main requests, this L-shaped kitchen is the perfect place for Fleming to unwind with her daughters, who were also a big part of the process because they like to bake and cook.

Finding space to store everything was no easy feat, but by eliminating an old closet Smart gained more space in the back of the kitchen for pots, pans, and baking sheets, even placing a swivel shelf in a blind corner. “She was such a problem solver,” says Fleming. “It functions as well as it is beautiful.”

Working with a deceptively smaller kitchen, Smart used as many SieMatic accessories possible, not wasting an inch within the large streamlined cabinets. The sleek-looking woodgrain-laminate veneer on bottom and gloss laminate on top provide contrast while tying it all together with similar colors. In addition, all cabinets have seals to keep out dust and moisture and feature a tracking system to provide lighting as well as other functional pieces, such as a paper towel holder, knife holder, and cookbook rest.

“By using so many accessories, we gave this room more space to function in, giving it as clean of a look as possible,” Smart says.

Smart also helped Fleming choose her Miele cooktop, oven, hood, and dishwasher, while convincing her a 30-inch EnergyStar-rated Sub-Zero fridge and 27-inch wine fridge, accompanied by two additional fridge drawers underneath, would work best with her needs.

“She entertains a lot, so having a place for her to store her own wine and wine she receives as gifts was very important,” Smart says. Perhaps the best part about her new refrigerator is the one-gallon container on the top shelf labeled “Tap Water: Please refill if empty.” Fleming says she doesn’t believe in water bottles, and drinks tap water all over the world, unless told it’s unsafe.

Located next to the fridge is an under-cabinet double trash can used for recycling, something that Fleming says her young daughters would come home and teach her about during their days of middle school. “We are really good about recycling, and the children are more sensitive to it because they learned it in school,” Fleming says.

Despite all the changes made to the space, what the designer left untouched was the countertop with views of the outdoor living area and Manhattan. The nook, with two stools, was a space Fleming insisted on, Smart says. With all the traveling this accomplished singer has planned for a recital tour beginning this month, to Quebec, Washington, D.C., New York’s Carnegie Hall, Ann Arbor, Montreal, and San Juan, she can look forward to returning to her luxurious, comfortable home in the heart of the city.