Search results for "Active agent" in Home Design Ideas

board and batten siding from local forests
Transitional exterior home idea in Albuquerque
Transitional exterior home idea in Albuquerque

Hamptons-inspired casual/chic restoration of a grand 100-year-old Glenview Craftsman. 4+beds/2baths with breathtaking master suite. High-end designer touches abound! Custom kitchen and baths. Garage, sweet backyard, steps to shopes, eateries, park, trail, Glenview Elementary, and direct carpool/bus to SF. Designed, staged and Listed by The Home Co. Asking $869,000. Visit www.1307ElCentro.com Photos by Marcell Puzsar - BrightRoomSF
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Gorgeous, single family Victorian in sought-after Narberth Borough. Thoughtfully renovated and beautifully restored, this lovely home sits on a lush, professionally landscaped yard, walking distance to public transportation and the shops, restaurants and activities of downtown Narberth. A meticulously refurbished wrap-around porch offers versatile living space, and easily converts from a fully enclosed sunroom to an open air front porch, perfect for enjoying the warmer months. Timeless character and period details are found throughout the home, with its gracious wide entry hall, high ceilings, gleaming wood floors, cottage glass windows, wood moldings and interesting millwork. Ample first floor living space includes living and family rooms with sweeping, oversized windows and custom built-ins, a large open dining room with exposed brick wall, and beautifully renovated kitchen with warm wood cabinetry, solid granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and breakfast bar. The second floor features an expansive master suite with charming office nook and generous walk-in closet & dressing area, a second comfortable bedroom, and a remodeled hall bath with seamless glass shower. The third floor has two considerable bedrooms, and a full bathroom with stunning clawfoot tub. Other amenities include: central air conditioning; convenient 1st floor laundry room; renovated 1st floor powder room; updated electric; newer roof and third floor windows; private, fenced in back yard with new patio and much more. Lovingly maintained and impeccably improved, this charming, unique home is truly move in ready for its new owners.

PowerView® Automation allows you to experience privacy or light when wanted. Simply take control with the option of operating motorization with the Pebble® Remote Control, voice activation, or the PowerView® App.

10 Ideas for Turning Your Garage into a Modern Industrial Neighborhood Bar
By Elizabeth Aldrich
Host happy hours and cocktail parties worthy of a full page spread – in your own garage.
Leave the brick exposed, the concrete floors as is, and the wood unfinished and it costs more? The sophisticated older brother of the shabby-chic trend, urban industrial style, is taking over. Real estate agents are able to tack on a few extra grand to a flat if they can include “exposed brick” in their advertisements, and designer chefs and master mixologists are moving into warehouses and industrial districts in urban areas across the nation. A friend recently invited me to dinner at Portland, Oregon’s newest, hippest charcuterie spot, and when we pulled up to the building it was in a warehouse where I used to go to underground raves in high school.
These industrial style spaces that were once seen as unfinished or lacking in coziness are now seriously coveted. Their rawness is considered authentic, their grit a mark of character. But if you’re a homeowner, there’s a good chance you already have one of them built right into your house: your garage.
I like to preach about how much people underutilize their garage spaces, piling them full of storage bins they never touch. Whether you turn it into a workspace or a playroom, there’s a lot of value in a creatively-used garage space. For the overly ambitious, the design lover, or the hostess with the mostess, here’s one idea that blows the rest out of the water.
Turn your garage into a multi-purpose, urban industrial wonderland for work and play.
Originally outfitted for factories and warehouses, the industrial style facilitates productivity. Now that it’s also being appreciated as a great aesthetic for bars and restaurants, these rooms can serve both form and function, doubling as work and entertaining spaces. This is great for people who have always dreamed of having that extra basement space for hosting friends, complete with a wet bar and a billiards table, but lack the square footage. Just keep in mind that your friends might love it so much, they’ll start ditching their favorite happy hour spot and showing up at your doorstep instead.
Here are ten ideas forbuilding the perfect workshop by day and cocktail bar by night in your garage.
1. Clean out the space. Get rid of everything you don’t need. Part of the beauty of industrial style designs is their simplicity and abundance of open space. Excessive clutter can make people feel boxed in, and that’s not conducive to productivity or to social activity. Out of sight, out of mind. Build shelving up high for storing must-keep belongings, much like a warehouse.
For bonus points, store your belongings in wooden crates for aesthetic consistency. Or consider stacking them on a pallet, wrapping them in excessive amounts of plastic wrap, and loading them onto the next cross-country freighter. You won’t miss them.
2. Install storage for frequently used objects. The brilliant thing about the urban industrial look is that your tools, tool boxes, and tool storage cabinets already fit right in. Metal storage cabinets and file cabinets are perfect additions to the space. While grey is certainly the color pallet for this style, 50 shades might be a few too many. Mix it up by spray painting one of your cabinetsto add a pop of color. Make a small pegboard to hold up your tools and hang larger items such as bicycles and recreational equipment by pegs. If you have a lot of storage bins that you have to keep, look upward instead of storing them on the floor. Insert a tracking system onto your garage ceiling and slide the bins into place.
For extra credit, get an old locker to use as a coat closet when guests come over.
3. Heat the space.Since you’re not turning the garage into a full-time living space, such as a spare bedroom, you really don’t need to go through the work and additional cost of installing full-blown heating and insulation systems. If you don’t need to use the space when the temperature drops, or if you live in a consistently temperate climate, you might not need to do anything. But if you do want to be able to host people through the winter, a simple garage heater will suffice. Here are some good options for installing garage heating.
Take it one step further, and get a couple patio heaters to help with the next step.
4. Turn your driveway into a patio space. Even the best restaurants and cocktail bars are nothing in the summertime without a solid patio space. Leave the garage door open on warmer nights and invite your guests to go outdoors. Place some stylish folding chairs and a patio table out for comfort. Place a few potted plants here and there to make the space feel more inviting.
For a really lively patio scene, put a portable fire pit out on the driveway or front lawn and surround it with workbenches from your garage.
5. Build your bar. Pick a corner in your garage for the bar, and get started. You can build a bar pretty cheaply and easily with reclaimed pallets, and get some industrial-style barstools. Behind the bar, you’ll have both your tools and your liquor, and there’s no need to build expensive cabinetry. If you’re serving quality, why cover it up? Build shelving or open cubicles to house your liquor. Put out metal buckets filled with ice to chill beers.Be sure to serve up cocktails worthy of the space. The Hemingway Daiquiri served straight up is a unique way to dress down, or industrialize, a traditionally frou-frou cocktail.
To go the extra mile, build a bar with laid brick.Install an extra fridge in the garage so you can avoid having to trek into the kitchen to refill chilled drinks, and you can store dips, vegetables, and other hors d'oeuvres right at your fingertips.
6. Bring on the games. To really turn your hosting space into a fun time, be sure to offer ample play options. For the low on space, a dart board will suffice, whereas if you’ve got a five-car garage and can’t manage to fill the space, put in a couple billiard tables. Ping pong tables are ideal for most because they’re great fun and can easily be folded up and stored.
If you want to keep your guests playing until the wee hours of the morning, get an old pinball machine, a vintage arcade game, or a small Skee-Ball alley.
7. The heart of your space.Build along worktable that doubles as a table for your guests right in the center of your garage. It should be tall enough to be used while standing, although you can place a few barstools along with it. Having a table space for drinks but limited seating will encourage guests to walk around and mingle. Build it out of wood and make sure to maintain a natural finish.
Don’t be afraid to rough up the work table by day. The dings and marks created while you build will only lend authenticity to the piece.
8. Install lighting. Remember, the urban industrial style is all about function and showcasing materials in their raw form. There’s no need to buy expensive floor lamps or install a fancy lighting system. The most popular lighting in these types of spaces is exposed bulb lighting. Just open up the wiring on your current lighting system and drop down some bulbs.
For additional lighting, string up exposed bulb patio lights and place some vintage metal desk lamps on the tables and bar area.
9. Brand your space. Use the designs for the stuff you build by day as wall art. Blow up sketches, blueprints, schematics, and architectural drawings to hang up for decoration. Choose one wall that could use a splash of color, perhaps the wall behind your bar, and get a friend to paint a mural, or whip out the spray paint for a real urban feel.
Splurge a little and get a custom neon sign made of your last name or the word “bar” to hang behind the bar.
10. The garage door. For the finishing touch, and to really wow your guests, get a brand new modern, industrial style garage door installed. Look for the window-paneled types that restaurants use, like this contemporary aluminum and glass beauty. You can leave it half open when you want to utilize your driveway-patio space.
On nights when you have to close it all the way, the glass panels let your guests still look out onto the stars, making it feel like a patio space even when it’s too cold for one.
Once your garage bar is up and running, put on your denim suit and get ready to call yourself the Joneses. No one will be able to keep up with you.

Large scale patterned carpets have made a big comeback. This piece from Milliken adds personality to the room.
Inspiration for a contemporary living room remodel in Chicago
Inspiration for a contemporary living room remodel in Chicago

Adding eucalyptus to the bathroom automatically creates an aromatherapy experience. The steam from the shower activates the stress relieving agents in the plant which is great for your skin and reduces migraines.

Ask a kitchen designer in Chicago which countertop question comes up most and you will hear the same answer: white or off-white quartz, and which shade. Homeowners walk into showrooms with a photo saved on their phone, usually a bright, veined slab from a magazine spread, and leave an hour later realizing there are a dozen versions of that same look. The confusion is not about taste. It is about the fact that "white quartz" covers a huge range of patterns, undertones, and price points, and nobody explains the differences before the sale.
Older bungalows and newer builds alike are getting stripped of their dated laminate and butcher block in favor of quartz, and the reasons are practical rather than trendy. Quartz does not need sealing, resists the kind of staining that granite can suffer over decades, and holds up to the freeze-thaw humidity swings that Chicago basements and kitchens go through every year. Once a homeowner commits to quartz, though, the real decision starts: which white, and does the pattern justify the difference in cost.
This piece walks through three specific slabs that keep showing up in Chicago renovation projects, why designers reach for them in different rooms, and what actually separates a flat white surface from one with real depth. None of this requires a design background to follow. It is mostly about paying attention to how a slab behaves under kitchen lighting, how busy the vending gets, and how it photographs versus how it looks in person.
Why White Quartz Took Over Chicago Kitchens
Ten years ago, granite dominated Chicago kitchen remodels almost by default. It was durable, it looked expensive, and every fabricator in the metro area carried a wide range of colors. Quartz has since taken over that position, and the shift happened faster than most contractors expected. Engineered stone gave homeowners a more predictable surface, since natural granite varies slab to slab while quartz is manufactured to a consistent pattern batch after batch.
The other driver is light. Chicago winters are long and gray, and a lot of kitchens, especially in older two-flats and courtyard buildings, do not get much direct sun. A dark granite countertop in a dim kitchen can make the whole room feel smaller. White and light-toned quartz reflects what little natural light comes through the windows, and it makes a galley kitchen or a north-facing space feel noticeably brighter without touching the cabinetry or the layout.
There is also a resale argument that local real estate agents bring up constantly. White quartz photographs well for listings, reads as updated and low-maintenance to buyers touring in person, and does not compete visually with whatever cabinet color the next owner might prefer. It is a safer bet than a bold veined marble look or a colored quartz that might feel dated in five years.
Arctic White and the Cost Question
Among the flatter, more uniform whites, arctic white quartz price comes up constantly in budget conversations because the slab sits at a more approachable point than the heavily veined Italian-marble-inspired patterns. It reads as clean and bright without the busy movement that some homeowners find overwhelming in a small kitchen. Fabricators in the Chicago area tend to keep it in stock precisely because demand stays steady across both new construction and remodel projects.
Part of what keeps this slab affordable relative to its heavily patterned cousins comes down to manufacturing complexity. A quartz surface with minimal veining and a consistent white base is simpler to produce at scale than one that mimics the irregular, high-contrast movement of natural Calacatta marble. That production difference shows up directly in what a homeowner pays per square foot, and it is worth asking a fabricator to walk through that pricing before assuming every white quartz costs the same.
Homeowners planning a full kitchen, including an island, backsplash, and perimeter counters, often use a flatter white like this specifically because it lets other elements carry the visual interest. A patterned tile backsplash or a bold cabinet color reads more clearly against a calm countertop than against one already fighting for attention with heavy veining. Designers frequently pair simpler whites with statement lighting fixtures for exactly this reason.
What Makes Calacatta Patterns Different
Calacatta refers to a family of marble originally quarried in Italy, known for a bright white background broken up by bold, often gold-toned veining that moves in thick, dramatic streaks rather than thin gray lines. Natural Calacatta marble is soft, porous, and expensive to maintain, which is exactly why quartz manufacturers spent years developing engineered versions that replicate the look without the upkeep headaches.
The challenge with any Calacatta-style quartz is getting the veining to look organic instead of printed. Early generations of engineered stone struggled with repetitive patterns that gave away the fact the slab was manufactured rather than cut from actual marble. Modern digital printing and layering techniques have closed that gap considerably, and the better Calacatta-inspired quartz lines now vary the veining across each slab batch so two counters in the same kitchen do not look identical.
Chicago designers gravitate toward Calacatta patterns for kitchens that function as the visual centerpiece of an open floor plan, which describes a large share of the gut renovations happening in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Roscoe Village, and the North Shore suburbs. When the kitchen island is visible from the living room and dining area, a dramatic veined surface becomes part of the home's overall design language rather than a purely functional work surface.
Calacatta Arno Under Kitchen Lighting
One of the more popular options in this category, calacatta arno quartz, balances a warm white base with soft gray and gold veining that avoids looking too stark under the cooler LED lighting common in newer Chicago builds. Homeowners touring showrooms sometimes make the mistake of judging a slab entirely under warm incandescent lighting, then get surprised when the same surface looks slightly different once installed under their kitchen's actual fixtures.
What separates this particular pattern from flatter competitors is how the veining clusters rather than spreading evenly across the slab. That clustering mimics the way real quarried marble forms, with denser mineral deposits in some sections and cleaner stretches in others. Fabricators cutting a large island slab from a single piece will often orient the pattern intentionally so the busiest veining lands somewhere visually interesting rather than getting cut off at an edge.
Because the background reads warmer than a stark white, this pattern tends to pair well with brass or matte gold hardware, a combination that has been showing up repeatedly in Chicago kitchen remodels over the past few renovation seasons. Cabinet painters report a similar trend, with more clients requesting warm white or greige cabinet colors specifically because they complement this kind of veined quartz better than a cooler, blue-toned white would.
Silestone's Version of the Calacatta Look
Manufacturers compete directly in this Calacatta-inspired category, and silestone eternal calacatta gold represents one brand's specific take on the pattern, distinguished by richer gold veining set against a brighter white base than some competing slabs in the same family. Silestone has built a reputation around anti-bacterial surface treatments in addition to the standard quartz durability, a detail some homeowners specifically ask about for kitchens used heavily by families with young children.
The veining in this particular slab tends to run in longer, more continuous lines compared to the clustered pattern found in some other Calacatta-style options, which gives large island surfaces a sense of visual flow from one end to the other. Fabricators working with bigger islands, the kind increasingly common in open-concept Chicago remodels, often favor patterns like this because there is less need to worry about seams interrupting a busy, disconnected pattern.
Price positioning for this slab tends to sit toward the upper end of the engineered quartz category, reflecting both the brand's manufacturing process and the complexity of replicating that continuous gold veining consistently across production batches. Homeowners weighing this option against other Calacatta-style quartz should ask their fabricator directly about batch availability, since premium patterns sometimes have longer lead times than standard stock colors.
Living With Quartz Day to Day
Beyond how a slab looks in a showroom or a listing photo, the daily experience of owning quartz countertops matters more once the renovation dust settles. Quartz resists scratching far better than laminate and holds up to the acidic spills, hot pans, and general abuse of an active kitchen without the sealing maintenance that natural stone requires every year or two. That low-maintenance reputation is a large part of why quartz overtook granite in the first place.
Heat resistance is a detail that gets less attention than it should. While quartz handles moderate heat well, manufacturers generally recommend using a trivet or pad for very hot pots straight off the stove, since sudden temperature shock can occasionally cause stress marks in the resin binder that holds the engineered stone together. This is a minor precaution rather than a major limitation, but it is worth mentioning to anyone assuming quartz is entirely indestructible.
Cleaning routines stay simple across almost every pattern in this category. A damp cloth and mild soap handle daily messes, and the nonporous surface means wine, coffee, and tomato-based sauces do not soak in the way they can with unsealed granite or marble. Homeowners moving from an older stone counter often mention how much less they worry about everyday spills once quartz is installed, which is a quality-of-life change that rarely makes it into the initial design conversation.
Choosing Between the Three
There is no single correct answer among these three slabs, and that is exactly why they keep coming up together in the same design conversations across Chicago renovation projects. A flatter white with minimal veining suits kitchens where other elements need to carry the visual interest, while a bolder Calacatta-inspired pattern makes sense when the countertop itself is meant to be the centerpiece of an open floor plan.
Budget matters too, and it is worth having a direct conversation with a fabricator about where each option lands before falling in love with a specific slab in a showroom. Lighting, cabinet color, and how the kitchen connects to the rest of the home all play into which pattern will actually look right once installation is finished rather than just in a photo.
Whatever direction a homeowner leans, seeing a full slab in person under actual kitchen lighting remains the single most useful step before signing off. Photos only go so far once the countertop is sitting in the room it will live in for years.

No kidding. This is the BEST Sophia in Mandalay and likely THE NICEST townhouse/condo in all of Bella Trae by Del Webb--Thousands of dollars in upgrades. We DARE you to find better and more convenient living than this home with superb access to all things that Champions Gate has to offer. Check out the wood grain tile throughout the first floor. Imagine how wonderful maintenance-free living can be. Come and see how this home's location is choice within Bella Trae's three gated sections. When you enter the neighborhood through the RFID-operated security gate, you are met with a peaceful, natural setting of wooded, pond views with a lovely lighted fountain. This Sophia model has a 2 car attached garage with a painted floor and a large screened-in lanai. The owners have installed motorized shades in the lanai for privacy and shade. All 3 bedrooms are on the 2nd floor and feature plush carpeting. The master suite has a spacious bathroom with a separate tub and shower and a walk-in closet. It's so large it could be your office with natural light and a window! Yes, a window in a closet! Bella Trae is a guard-gated community with a 12,500 sqft clubhouse including a state-of-art fitness center, heated pool & spa, putting green, bocci ball court and tennis/pickleball court. The HOA fee includes grounds maintenance, cable TV, highspeed internet, pest control, building maintenance, trash, sponsored clubs, an activities director and manager on site. It's like a 55plus community but NOT AGE RESTRICTED!

Inspiration for a large mediterranean ceramic tile living room remodel in Hyderabad with white walls

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