When Santa Barbara Magazine asked me to write an article about the massive remodel done by Imaging Spence (yes, that’s her given name), I kind of dreaded it. You may recall that her husband Gerry Spence is a famous attorney and author, and I feared that the couple might be snotty and ostentatious and arrogant.…
I’ve been especially enchanted with several house photos in my collection, and I finally realized what they have in common: All of the homes use natural light to make the journeys from room to room more pleasant. The top photo shows Claire Gunning, 8, walking down the stairway in her family’s Hermosa Beach home, which…
The more I study this “green” house, the more I like it. Of course, it’s more of a teardown and rebuild than a remodel, but the lot size — at 30 feet by 50 feet — presented plenty of challenges. The 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house, which is two blocks from the beach in Hermosa, was designed for a…
Outside of Charlotte, N.C., Judy Hammill moved back to the farmhouse where she grew up and that her own father built. But the kitchen was dated and would not work as Judy settled into retirement and got older. She won a makeover from AARP and an aging-in-place specialist to make the kitchen accessible. The new…
How important is a fireplace and mantel? Take it from a man who tours hundreds of houses a year and whose sales depend on features that attract buyers: “Every room needs a centerpiece,” says David Kean, an interior designer and real estate agent with The John Aaroe Group, in Beverly Hills, Calif. According to Kean,…
This idea is so unique that we at Kathy’s Remodeling Blog can hardly stand it: You can have your own garden flowers imbedded into resin panels for use as kitchen or bathroom cabinet inserts. See some options here Can you imagine your favorite flowers, that you grew, immortalized in resin panels? You can use translucent…
Here at Kathy’s Remodeling Blog, I may be destined to one day have a kitchen with a wall of windows because each time I see a kitchen like this, I feel a pull on my heart. Here are some examples: A kitchen in Sonoma, California, that overlooks a courtyard, in USA Today A kitchen in…
The first thing I do when an episode of Designed to Sell comes on HGTV is check to see if Lisa LaPorta is the designer host. No offense to other worthy designers on the show, but Lisa is my favorite. She’s real. She’s talented. She’s calm. She’s classy. I just prefer to spend by Designed to…
Somehow I got onto the mailing list of a British kitchen shop called Magnet. As I live in the United States, there’s very little chance I’ll be hiring these folks to design and build my new kitchen. But they sent me a link to a daytime talk show This Morning where one of their kitchens…
It’s been said that home fashions follow the fashion world. It’s also been said that this year’s fashion statements are right from the ’50s And look at this photo of Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actress Blake Lively at Fashion Week in New York City. See a little ’50s vibe in the mix? If you…