Arclinea has come up with some absolutely stunning kitchen designs, one of which is the Spatia, which is ideal for the kitchen-as-a part-of-a-Great-Room. You can hide it, but what you are hiding is not a truncated kitchen that fits into a rather confined space. You are hiding a full-size kitchen.

Plastic laminate is an alternative countertop product that gets my vote. Even if you don’t install it yourself, the cost savings is substantial. The question, though, is will it look beautiful or just cheap? And that is what so excited me about Karran Edge Sinks when I saw them at KBIS.

New Ravenna Mosaics has formed a collaboration with Giovanni Barbieri, who has created a surface treatment that transforms marble into an undulating surface material that looks like nothing less than stone that has been laid down by the ancients.

Mostly, I like going home and being home. I always have. I was a bachelor for a solid decade after I got out of the Army, and even then, I mostly stayed home. A comfortable recliner/rocker and a stack of books I really want to read has always done it for me.