I promised myself I’d be super careful when choosing my kitchen colors. Why? These events: First and foremost, and my daily reminder, is the garish green that got painted onto my exterior trim when I asked the budget painter guy to match colors on a house I’d seen. There I was, the morning the crew…
Back in the 1980s, Michelle Griffoul chose her home for one reason. “It had forklift access to the backyard,” said Michelle, who bought the home, in the Santa Barbara County community of Los Olivos, when she was a fledgling ceramic-tile artist with a very large kiln. “The house itself was irrelevant.” But the sage-green house…
I’ve been lucky enough to meet two amazing TV decorators: Amanda Pays from Fine Living’s "Breathing Room," and Kitty Bartholomew from HGTV’s "You’re Home: Kitty Bartholomew." (Kitty and I later wrote a book together, now out of print). Amanda and Kitty shared with me two golden nuggets of decorating wisdom. But really, those nuggets never…
Michael Abel, an architect and contractor from California, and his Israeli-born wife Nava, built and decorated this 1,800-square-foot, five-bedroom, three-bathroom home in the town of Zichron Yaacov, Israel, which overlooks the Mediterranean. This is from an article in the New York Times. The article says that many of the building materials, including interior doors, were…
Although the sleek new kitchen in Bethany Orlemann and Danny Miller’s vintage Eagle Rock bungalow took only eight weeks to build in the summer of 2007, planning it was a three-year affair. The couple’s meandering path to a new kitchen took a series of twists and turns that began with Orlemann researching design magazines and…
While Gretchen Zee bought her 1960s tract house in Santa Barbara for its lush one third-acre ocean-view lot overlooking an oak-covered hillside, she had to go outside the house to get any sense of nature. The house was, in fact, backed up to the views, oriented to offer visions of the driveway from the family…
The new kitchen? It’s ’100% us’ A Glassell Park couple get personal in their latest redo — down to the cat-feeding station. As Kristina Johnson and David Franke discovered while remodeling their Glassell Park kitchen, taking charge of the job — drawing the plans, buying materials, supervising contractors for some work and doing a portion…
A friend sent me a link this morning from TMZ showing (supposedly) the interior of Phil Spector’s home, sometimes referred to as “The Castle.” What’s eerie to note is that the predominant interior color in his house (maroon) seems to be the same color I painted the exterior of my house. My color is called…