Know any kitchens looking for a makeover?

The funny thing about Paul’s blog is that he doesn’t actually post a lot of his kitchen and residential design makeovers!! So I thought I’d take this opportunity as one of Paul’s guest posters to post a couple of kitchens — one real and one virtual.

My hubby and I recently finished our kitchen makeover (with some help from Paul). You can read all about it over on my blog, DesignTies. Here are a few pictures…

It was a long and at times frustrating job, but we love the results and we won’t be making any more changes to it any time soon. But the problem is that I have a great idea for a kitchen design and no kitchen to do it in. Know any kitchens looking for a makeover?? ;-)

This was actually an assignment for my Interior Finishes class. We had to design a kitchen for a single mom and her 14 year old daughter. Here’s a rendition of one wall I created in Paint:

The kitchen has white appliances, so that was my jumping off point for the design. The colour scheme came from a beautiful grey, silver, and blue paisley fabric and a blue chenille. The paint colours are Benjamin Moore: AF-570 Coastline for the walls, AF-575 Instinct for the inside of the glass cabinets, and OC-61 White Diamond for the cabinets.

The Shaker-style cabinet doors have glass knobs for some sparkle, and the drawers have stainless steel bin pulls (both from Amerock).

    

The backsplash is this awesome mosaic from Mirage Glass Tiles in NYC. The 1” x 1” tiles are a combination of glass, metal, and stone. They’re like jewelry for the kitchen :-)

The countertops are Hanstone in Sterling Grey. You can’t see them in the picture, but there are flecks of silver that give it a nice reflective quality.

The faucet is the Belo from Brizo. I love the sleek & sexy lines!!

There’s an island with two nickel lantern pendant lights from Union Lighting and Furnishings hanging above.

And three counter-height stools from BarStools.com along one side of the island. They’ll be covered in the blue chenille.

Dark hand-scraped hardwood floors to finish it all off: 

If you’d like to see more of my room makeovers and designs — both virtual and real ;-) — check out my blog, DesignTies.

Thanks for the opportunity to guest-post for you, Paul :-) Hope you had a great time in Chicago!!

Would you like light with that? The rise and rise of LEDs

Greetings, Kitchen and Residential Design readers - I'm Sarah Lloyd, I blog at KitchenClarity, mostly on kitchen and bath design, but sometimes on whatever takes my fancy that day. Thank you Paul, you are very brave to open up your esteemed publication to the likes of me.

I've just got back from KBIS, and yes, Paul's Sketch-up/American Gothic presentation was magnificent - I hope he'll be putting the whole thing up on the blog for you all to see. Naturally that was the highlight of the show, but I did also manage to notice a few other things - including how LED lighting is creeping - no, stampeding - into everything kitchen & bath. You can have it in shower heads, faucets, sinks, tubs, tiles, counter tops and just about any other surface you could think of, as well as "ordinary" applications like light fixtures:


Tub with LED Mood Lighting by Kaldewei

I think that all artists and designers - product, interior, industrial, etc. - have a secret and maybe subconscious envy of lighting designers: they get to work with the fundamental element that makes all other design possible. After all, those first paleolithic cave-painters at Chauvet wouldn't have produced anything at all without the man or woman holding the torch for them, would they?


32,000 Year Old Decor - Cave paintings at Chauvet in France

Show me an interior designer who doesn't own way too many light fixtures (and chairs, but that's another story) for their space, and I'll show you someone who isn't really a designer. So it's my theory that the coming of age of the LED as a reliable, cool, energy efficient, inexpensive and controllable light source is bringing out the repressed lighting designer in all the product and industrial designers. And in fashion designers too:


Ingo Maurer & Janet Hansen, 2002


Rhyme & Reason Creative

Now sometimes the LED lighting serves a practical purpose, in faucets and showers the light can change color to indicate the temperature of the water,


Rettangolo by Gessi

you could argue that if your vanity sink doubles as a softly glowing LED lamp you won't need a night-light in the bathroom,


Toto "Halo" Vanity Sink

and the folks at Rhyme&Reason very reasonably point out that their garments can be used as lamps too, rather than just hanging wastefully in the closet when you are not wearing them.

I think that's all baloney, or what the designers told their marketing departments (same thing?) - they are designing with light because they finally can without melting anything or burning anyone or giving them an electric shock or a shocking electricity bill, and because it's the most fun thing to design with as well as the most fundamental.

I do wonder where all this will leave us in the sustainability equation? We have this technology that lets us produce light with much lower energy costs than ever before, but we are using it to put said light into all sorts of applications that never needed light before. Even if they last 20 years, all those LED semi-conductor boards will eventually have to be broken up and their raw materials laboriously reclaimed or recycled. Are we just chasing our own tails? We're having enormous fun with it, but that, according to my dog Daisy, is pretty much what tail chasing is all about.

Cement Tiles Provide Form & Function

I'm Bill Buyok, owner of Avente Tile, and primary contributor for our blog, Tile Talk. This is my first post on Kitchen and Residential Design. I want to thank Paul for letting me share my zeal for tile with his readers! My passion is hand-painted and handcrafted tiles from around the globe, and that's all you'll find at Avente Tile. I am also a devotee of handmade cement tiles, also called Cuban Tiles, or mistakenly called encaustic tiles among numerous other names.

Cement tile is design at its best in both form and function. Made of cement, these tiles are a green product and both durable and strong with great insulating properties. In form, the tiles become works of art with infinite possibilities using almost any pattern, a large existing color pallette, and the option for custom colors as well.

Here's a home tour that showcases the versatility, beauty, and function of cement tile.

The entryway greets you with an intricate and bold pattern surrounded by a single row of solid color cement tile and stone. The colors in the floor work well with this antique door.





The formal dining room uses cement tile in the traditional rug pattern.





Leading out to the large patio, a less common design places four tiles together within a grid of solid color cement tile. This creates an exquisite open-air patio that runs the length of the home.





And, to emphasize the idea that cement tiles are indeed an artistic expression, I found this object d'art - framed and hanging at the end of the patio.





Could there be anything more perfect than this to symbolize how well cement tiles work in both form and function? I hope you enjoyed the tour!

Find Out More about Cement Tile
Avente Tile offers a complete line of solid color and patterned cement tiles. Choose from geometric designs and stylistic floral patterns in traditional and contemporary colors. Solid color tiles are available in approximately 80 colors. Some patterns are stocked for quick delivery.

View our online catalog of designs:

• Classic Cement Tile
• Cuban Heritage Cement Tile
• Solid Color Cement Tile

Or, call us toll free at 888.739.4972, 9 AM - 5 PM PST, Monday through Friday. Or, by e-mail: info@aventellc.com.

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An American (Appliance Blogger) in Paris

Hi, I'm Julie Warner, author of Kitchen and Home Appliance Blog (creative title, eh?) for my family's appliance company, Warners' Stellian.

I strong-armed the keys to Paul's blog away from him before he left for the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show in Chicago. Thankfully, his readers have the best sense of humor of any of the design blogs I follow. So please, humor me as I -- an appliance blogger, not a designer -- attempt to fill his shoes.

I visited Europe for the first time for two weeks in late March, traveling to Portugal, France and Italy during my stay. Friends encouraged me to take pictures, but I'm not much of a chronicler; I don't even own a digital camera.

However, the Palace of Versailles blew me away enough with its scale and extravagance to make me turn on my cell phone and snap some (rare) pictures. They're not spectacular nor comprehensive, but anything that gets me to take a picture on vacation is worth highlighting.


I can't exactly remember which rooms are which -- there are so many -- but I believe this was either a king's bedroom or dressing room. There was so much to look at, from the artwork to the wallpaper, to the molding -- which was often gilded -- to the chandeliers to...


...the chairs. I took a picture of this chair because I could actually see it in a future house of my own. I think it's so beautiful.


This wallpaper is outrageous, in a good way, I think. If I commissioned paintings of myself, this is precisely how I'd display them -- marble and all.


No stone left unturned? More like no spot left bare. There are gold clocks on top of gold mirrors on hand-painted walls with intricate, gold-dipped moldings behind crystal chandeliers...


I covet the detail on the interior of this fireplace. Again, no space left undecorated.


OK, this couch simply reminded me of my mother, who collects antiques. I absolutely loved it.


At this point, my friends were judging me for getting excited about wallpaper and furniture. And we needed to leave.

Next stop? What a 180: Pompidou Centre, home to the National Museum of Modern Art -- and some pretty fantastic architecture.


I also snapped this picture with my phone. We're at the top level of the structure, after climbing many stories up the clear tube-encased escalator. It looks like it goes on forever, doesn't it?


This exhibit caught my eye, for obvious reasons, while visiting the female artist-focused exhibit, elles@centrepompidou. (Watch a clip of Martha Rosler's feminist video, Semiotics of the Kitchen.)


The kitchen has been historically decided to be "the woman's space." And despite the existence of female home designers, the exhibit said, "(translated by Google) Particularly in France, the access of women designers in the industry is still limited."

Thanks for letting me share my two favorite places I visited in France with you. I'd love to hear if you agree if people just see Versailles' decoration as gaudy or if they were inspired like I was. The Pompidou challenged my thinking -- always a good thing. But I'm not afraid to admit that some of the stuff in there was just plain WEIRD.

Help me help my new house

Hi, I'm Julie Warner, author of Kitchen and Home Appliance Blog for my family's appliance company, Warners' Stellian.

This is my second post as a guest blogger for Paul (here's my previous post).

Paul suggested I use this opportunity to solicit help from you all in decorating my first house, which I will be moving into in June.

My friend took this picture of me during the home inspection (notice the legs in the pantry in the background). I'm sitting between the living room and kitchen, probably giggling nervously at the prospect of making so many design decisions.



The homeowners' current colors of blue and yellow don't particularly suit my taste. And actually, they're the exact colors of both my high school and college (Go Marquette!). So, these feel more like my past than my future.

I'm thinking gray -- darker in the living room, lighter in the kitchen. The living room has a lot of light, as does the kitchen, to a lesser degree. We're ripping up the carpet to reveal the hardwood floors of this 1953 house.

My friend (and future roommate) that took this photo is inheriting the furniture for our living room (pictured in its current home):



Not pictured is an oversized chair that matches the couch. The biggest hurdle?



Blue laminate countertops. Right now they pretty much match the living room wall (the bright color starts to make sense right about now).

What I'd love your help on:

Wall colors
Are grays a good choice?

Ceiling fan
You can kind of see the blue ceiling fan in the above picture. I'd like to replace it with something less....blue. I'd be open to creative ideas.

Accent colors
I'd love to do a gold or mustard in the living room, but I'm lost for the kitchen because of the challenge of the blue countertops. For instance, I'm afraid to set out my red Viking food processor.

Furniture
The couch is a bit drab, but I'll gladly take it because I'm saving my pennies for a European dishwasher, Electrolux steam washer, Miele vacuum and Vermont Castings grill (I'm such a product of my environment).

I'm also not sure if I should paint the wood furniture black. We could probably fit another chair or loveseat, if I can come up with a good idea for what I should have.

I also need to devise a plan for the small eating area (behind the breakfast bar in the picture), for which we have a blond wood table and four chairs. We can paint those too, if we want.

Help?