We bought a new house with a horrible kitchen. Not only the colors, cabinets and everything else was old and ugly, but also the layout was very bad: the work area - sink, stove, fridge - was right on the path from the door to the backyard. We decided to go down to the studs and completely redo it. We wanted to open it to the little family room.
Since our budget was limited, we came up with the new design ourselves, with the help of crowd sourcing, and consulted with an architect only for a couple hours to get some overall advice. Our budget would not allow us to change anything regarding door and windows, so we had to work around them. It turned out great and we are very happy!