So far you have voted for your favorite white kitchen and your favorite kitchen with wood cabinets in my ongoing contest. Today I’m showing you 5 readers’ kitchens with cabinets painted black, gray, blue, red–anything but white! Take a look and then tell us which one you like best (email subscribers will have to click over to my blog to vote).

Click the pics and links to see the original posts about these kitchens:

1. Alyson’s Kitchen

2. Chris’s Kitchen

3. Sylvina’s Kitchen

4. Penelope’s Kitchen

5. Kimberly’s Kitchen

After you vote for your favorite in each of the 5 categories (2 more to come!), you’ll choose the overall winner, who will get a $150 Visa card and bragging rights. You can see more kitchen contest entries here.

VOTE:

This “petite antique cape” in Vermont was built in the 1820s and reminds me of one of my favorite movie houses–Diane Keaton’s in Baby Boom. After a recent renovation, the homeowners shouldn’t have all the problems she did with hers, though (remember when it was snowing on her stairs?).

The architectural firm of Smith & Vansant was enlisted to update the old house, and on their website they explain the design challenge: “The size of the original building is very small, so everything we did needed to respect that scale, especially as seen from the road.”

“The house is quite small by today’s standards,” Pi Smith, the project architect, told Houzz. “All of the spaces we designed are working really hard.”

Two of the client’s primary goals were to have a better indoor-outdoor relationship in the house and to use “every conceivable nook & cranny as creatively as possible for storage.”

I love all the bookshelves throughout the house.

The homeowners also wanted a new “sunlit, eat-in farmhouse kitchen to be the center of the house.”

“The client had owned the home for 15 years, dreaming of and planning for a kitchen renovation for every one of them. While she waited, she filled her barn with collections in anticipation of the day they would rebuild, storing vintage plumbing fixtures, light fixtures, cabinet hardware and antique tiles, among other things.”

“The renovation began with the kitchen, and the kitchen began with this oversized salvaged sink, which had been waiting in the barn for years for its moment in the sun,” according to an article in Houzz written by Becky Harris. You can read the rest of it and get all the details about the renovation there.

The outdoor spaces are as beautiful as the indoor. For more photos and information about the Wiley Hill Cape project, visit the Smith & Vansant website. Photos by Rob Karosis.

Michael C. Hall, star of the Showtime drama Dexter, recently purchased this $3.8 million Spanish Colonial overlooking downtown L.A. It was built in 1923 but has been so thoroughly updated that you’d hardly know it was that old.

The house has 6 bedrooms, 6 baths, and about 5,600 square feet.

Redfin describes the odd light fixtures in the bathroom as “Dexter-like:”

The decorating is very “on trend” with all the gray. Do you like it?

For more photos and information: Redfin and the L.A. Times. It was listed by Konstantine Valissarakos of Sotheby’s International Realty. Visit my Celebrity Houses page to see the others I’ve featured.

By the way, Hall’s neighbor happens to be Private Practice star Kate Walsh, who’s still trying to sell her own Spanish Colonial across the street for $4.75 million. You can see her house here.

P.S. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there–including mine! 

When Amy moved into her new house, she says she was “a bit nervous to sign the lease” because it was smaller than she was used to–990 square feet to be exact. One of her biggest concerns was the living room–she sent me this “before” photo of it, saying, “It looked like a teeny tiny little box!”

All the windows and doors around the room didn’t help, but she managed to turn the “tiny box” of a space into a warm and welcoming living room. Here’s how it looks now:

She says, “It’s pretty amazing how some thoughtful furniture placement can really make a difference. This living room is less than half the size of the one in our previous home, but you really don’t feel like it when you’re in the space.”

Inspired by something she saw at Restoration Hardware, Amy created her own factory cart-style coffee table. You can read how she made it here.

She found that vintage wicker chair for $65 and says it was “the color of a band-aid.” But she loved the shape of it and it was in great condition, so she painted it red. Here’s a photo of it in mid-transformation:

You can read more about the chair’s makeover here. It really makes a statement in red. And because it’s more tall than wide, it doesn’t take up too much space in the corner:

The bookshelves were another DIY project of hers. She got them at Target and says they “aren’t what you’d call the highest of quality. They are the kind of shelving that you put together yourself, and the backing is not the prettiest. It’s that terrible cardboard covered in a fake wood veneer.”

So she covered the backs of them with a patterned fabric that would give that side of the room a little more “punch.” You can read the DIY tutorial about how she did it here.

Here’s another photo of the room taken before they moved in:

And here’s how that corner looks now:

For more photos of Amy’s house, check out her charming blog The Blissful Bee, where she writes about her adventures in DIY, interior design and photography.

For More Small-Space Inspiration…

8 Small(er) Kitchens My Readers Cook In

Check it out–these 5 kitchens actually have (gasp!) wood cabinets. Out of the all entries that readers submitted for my contest, I’d say 75% of them had white cabinets, so it was always kind of nice to see something different. Take a look and then vote for your favorite below (email readers will have to click over to my blog):

Click the pics and links to see the original posts about these kitchens:

 1. Laura’s Kitchen

 2. Chania’s Kitchen

3. Barbara Ann’s Kitchen

4. Karin’s Kitchen

5. Jodie’s Kitchen

After you vote for your favorite in each of the 5 categories in the weeks to come, you’ll choose the overall winner, who will get a $150 Visa card and bragging rights. You can see more of the most popular kitchens from the contest here.

POLL:

Whoa. This 20,000 square-foot, $22.5 million mansion in the Tournament Hills neighborhood of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the kind of property you don’t see every day of the week. It’s filled with gold and marble and statues, oh, my…

The listing describes it as “an exquisite European estate.” It was built in 1999, but another 12,000 square feet were added in 2012 (just imagine how cramped it must have been with only 8,000!).

It sits on 1.7 acres on a golf course and comes with “two guest houses, two staff quarters and limo-length garages.”

They imported some 200-year old stained glass windows from Europe for this house.

There are 8 bedrooms. I think there’s a bed in this photo somewhere…

You’ll never have to stand in line with 13 bathrooms.

There’s an indoor pool…

…and an outdoor pool.

Want it? For more photos and information, check the listing with Jerry Masini of Award Realty.

P.S. It kind of reminds me of Bill Murray’s glitzy mansion in Zombieland:

It’s on the market in Atlanta for $19.9 million. You can see the photos here.

It’s always fun to look through the Seattle-area real estate listings because there are so many great Craftsman-style houses in that part of the country. This one in the Mt. Baker neighborhood was built in 1912 but has been updated with things like a second-floor laundry. It’s on the market for $985,000–take a look!

The listing says, “The gracious covered porch and gorgeous leaded glass windows are just the teaser to this elegant home. Gleaming hardwood floors, expansive day rooms with high ceilings and elaborate millwork combine with a stunning floor plan.”

It’s a fairly large house with 3,580 square feet and a finished basement.

There are 4 bedrooms and 3 baths.

The second-floor laundry:

Like it? For more photos and information, check the listing with Darcy LaBelle of Windermere. (Thanks to Kim for telling me about it!)

P.S. Click here to see more Craftsman-style houses, including…

Another Updated Craftsman in Bellevue

Jessica Simpson is selling her 5 bedroom, 5.5 bath home in Beverly Hills for close to $8 million. The listing says it’s located in Hidden Valley, “one of the most private guarded celebrity enclaves” and has had “recent interior design and renovations by Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic Couture.”

The house where Kimora Lee Simmons filmed her reality TV show Life in the Fab Lane is next door. And Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban bought a house around the corner (you can see pics of it here).

“This area of Beverly Hills is dotted with homes owned by celebrities. You can often spot a star walking their dog through the many canyon trails nearby,” local real estate agent Corina Galen told Redfin.

Ellen DeGeneres once owned this house. It would be fun to see photos of how it looked when she lived here. (You can see the horse ranch she now shares with Portia in the Santa Monica mountains here.)

You can definitely see the Rachel Ashwell/Shabby Chic influence on the house. It’s all very light and feminine, with plenty of slipcovers.

This looks like it might be her daughter Maxwell’s room:

For more photos and information, check the Sotheby’s listing and the article at Redfin.

Simpson bought this house after her divorce from Nick Lachey in 2005 for $5.275 million. Did you watch their reality-TV show Newlyweds? For a trip down Memory Lane–pics of their Newlyweds Love Nest:

Jessica is expecting her second child with Eric Johnson, and they just bought Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne’s former home for their growing family (you can see the photos of it here).

Click here to see more Celebrity Houses, including Jessica’s famous neighbors:

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s house around the corner

T he stairs in my house are a mess. The carpet is old and worn and looks a lot like Jennifer’s did in that “before” photo above. So I’m always on the look-out for some staircase inspiration. After some hard DIY work, here’s how hers looks now…

I’m impressed with all the details they added not only to the staircase but to the rooms around it, as well. The crown molding and woodwork give the space more character, and replacing the old tile with hardwood make a big difference, too. This really makes me want to tackle my own sorry stairs. (Thanks, Jennifer!)

Head over to her blog Classic Style Home for all the details about the makeover. While you’re there, be sure to check out the other rooms that got a new look–including her kitchen.

Click here to see more great makeovers, including…

Turning a Little-Used Dining Room Into a Family Room

We’ve looked at a LOT of great kitchens that your fellow readers submitted for my contest since I started featuring them last November. I tried to narrow them down to the Top 10 but couldn’t do it. Instead, I decided to divide them into 5 basic categories and then choose the Top 5 in each so we can vote on those first, starting with the most popular white kitchens. Ready?

You can click the pics and links below if you want to see the original posts about each kitchen with more photos and information:

1. Cari’s Kitchen

2. Julie’s Kitchen

3. Heather’s Kitchen

4. Amber’s Kitchen

5. Kay’s Kitchen

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After you vote for your favorite in each of the 5 categories in the weeks to come, you’ll choose the overall winner, who will get a $150 Visa card and bragging rights. You can see more of the most popular kitchens from the contest here.

VOTE: