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Kitchen Confidential Kiely and architect Maxim Laroussi designed the kitchen unit. “I originally didn’t want an island, but I liked what we did because it feels like a piece of furniture. It’s cozy to cook around,” Kiely says. Panels of orange and olive Formica accent the 1950s-inspired piece, which houses a cooktop by Smeg. A checkerboard of closed cabinets and open shelves offers storage against the far wall for Kiely’s collection of dishes, knickknacks, cookbooks, and small appliances, like the KitchenAid stand mixer and radio by Vita Audio. The floor is green Marmoleum, selected because it feels warm underfoot. Kiely’s own Stem dish towels and ceramic storage jars add more lively color to the room.

"The kitchen is like stepping into a time machine, and I love it," says Thomas. "It has such a great energy to it, and it’s truly a pleasure to cook in." This was the first design project in which she didn't remodel the kitchen, though she did create an additional kitchen in the garage for photoshoots.

The green hue permeates her space, including this boho sitting area.

Food blogger and commercial director Claire Thomas honors this Brentwood home’s heartwarming history. Jack and Marilyn Zuber lived in the Brentwood home for 65 years without altering anything but the wallpaper. Thomas even has photos of them digging on the site when construction first began. Out of respect for the home, Thomas tread carefully with her updates, even keeping the old drapes and using the original paint colors as a jumping-off point in researching color palettes of the era. Her approach was to "celebrate and preserve, rather than rip out and change."

To Claire Thomas, it was a perfect time capsule with wood-clad walls, a hidden bar, room dividers, and a chrome-edged streamlined kitchen.

Carrara marble countertops and backsplash add a luxurious feel, as does the dark green leather upholstery on the bench seating which, in a space-saving move, is essentially part of the kitchen island. The Highline linear pendant light is from Archier.

Colored wall cabinets and a kitchen island structure the open-plan cooking area. White-painted bricks and a large skylight keep the space bright.

No whiteware here. In this moody apartment in Berlin, multi-toned charcoal gray subway tiles make up the backsplash, which contrasts with the pop of rosy color on the kitchen cabinets.

"Also consider performance when purchasing an older house, as these properties use a ton of energy,” says Schaer. “Many midcentury homes are minimally insulated and can be costly and challenging to remedy. For example, if you want to add insulation to a roof, you have to add it above the roof because there is no cavity for insulation."

“The kitchen didn’t really have a home,” says Colkitt. His solution was to build the sleeping loft directly above it, giving the kitchen some architectural congruity, and implement recessed lighting into the dropped ceiling, also the underside of the floor of the sleeping loft. Like the reading loft, the sleeping loft is open on both sides to bring in light and air, with a single ladder leading up to it. “The sleeping loft ‘fold’ is a complement to the reading loft ‘fold’—they balance each other out,” says Colkitt. Photo by Cheryl Ramsay

Full-height, black sliding glass doors connect the interior spaces to the rear courtyard and enable indoor/outdoor living.

In the kitchen, Angle removed the cabinet doors and applied a coat of Poppy Red paint by Benjamin Moore, and put down a striped linoleum floor to brighten the space.

Lin specified the String shelving across the walnut panel wall and had it surround a restored Paul McCobb credenza that the couple found at a garage sale twenty years ago. “Almost everything in our apartment has a story,” says Kitty.

In this Palm Springs duplex, for cabinet doors, the architect owner designed aqua blue plywood sliders that park at specific positions, fitting together like puzzle pieces. Contractor Franklin Pineda custom-built these cabinets using Baltic birch plywood from Anderson Plywood.

If you don't like handles sticking out from your cabinet doors, then one quirky and clever idea is to have a hole drilled near the top of the cabinet door, so you can stick you finger in it and pull the door open. These orange-painted MDF cabinets in a New Zealand beach house is an example of how this idea works brilliantly in cheery, low- kitchen.