Emmanuel Fonte | Music | Art | Leadership
If music be the food of love, play on. Emmanuel Fonte website is about music, art, real estate, architecture, design and decor. Occasionally, I talk about my other passion, hockey.
Maybe you’ve found the house you want to grow old in. Perhaps you foresee your elderly parents moving in with you one day. Or maybe you require wheelchair accessibility. When you’re designing a kitchen with these needs in mind, the following 10 tips will help make it safer and easier to navigate.
No matter the size of your home, it’s important to make room not just for your furnishings, but also for sufficient circulation space in which to move around and enjoy your home properly. I’ve put together some of the most common rules for how much negative space you need, along with suggestions for how to handle tricky scenarios where there just isn’t enough space. After all, sometimes you have to bend the rules a little.
A designer helps a couple update the kitchen with an efficient layout and custom details like a walnut-topped peninsula
Bryan and Heather Kurey looked at their dysfunctional kitchen and considered moving into a new home. The aging oak cabinets, oversize breakfast area and lack of countertops didn’t create a welcoming space for a couple who love to cook. But they soon realized that most of the homes they considered buying also had kitchens that needed updating. The couple looked at photos on Houzz and other sources and became inspired to remodel what they had.
They hired designer Lisa Quina, who had helped them renovate other areas of the late-1930s home in Arlington, Virginia. Quina relocated appliances, added windows, enlarged an opening to the family room, improved storage and used local artisans for custom details that add character. Now the family enjoys a brighter kitchen that combines classic, industrial and modern design elements to better reflect its style and love of cooking.
If you’re looking for a timeless color scheme that will keep your kitchen out of the trends and in style for the long term, then look no further than one of these nine classic color combinations.
When you work at home, even part time, you discover that a makeshift desk area on a kitchen counter or the dining table isn’t the best setup. Having a dedicated home office, even if it’s compact, makes a big difference in comfort and productivity. Once you’ve chosen a room or area for your home office, here are five must-haves to include in it.
There’s a new design challenge that goes along with today’s glass shower enclosure trend. Many people like to wipe down the glass walls with a squeegee right after a shower to keep the glass free of spots and streaks. But where do you keep the squeegee so it’s handy but not in the way? With thoughtful placement, a squeegee can serve as an attractive accent or be cleverly concealed from view. Here are seven ways designers are stylishly incorporating them into showers.
Shiplap is a popular material that provides a classic, timeless look. While white painted boards installed horizontally are most commonly seen, most of these stylish powder rooms show that shiplap can be featured in other ways too. Check out these 10 powder rooms that rock shiplap and let us know which one hits the right note for you.
Looking for fresh design ideas for your home? A smart way to start is by looking at designs that are popular on Houzz. And the following spaces feature just such designs. Each of these photos won a 2020 Best of Houzz Design award; the awards, which were announced this week, recognize designs that had the most user engagement, including saves to ideabooks, in 2019. While we can’t feature all of the award-winning designs — there are many around the world — we put together a few standout home design ideas from a handful of the U.S. award winners.
A kitchen designer describes the seven elements her clients most frequently request
Embarking on a kitchen remodel is both an exciting and daunting endeavor for most people. My goal as a kitchen designer is to guide my clients through the multitude of decisions that need to be made. To begin, I always ask what they envision in their dream kitchen. Not surprisingly, there is a universal chorus on their requirement list, unlike their wish list, which is diverse and based on their specific desires. Read on to find my most requested kitchen must-haves.