Designs for Living, Inc

Cary is a pleasure to work with. She has so many good ideas but is also a very good listener. The cabinets we bought through her were of excellent quality. We highly recommend her.

Cary built the cabinets for our kitchen and master bath, and we are very pleased with the results. The quality of the craftsmanship is high, and the price was very competitive. The cabinets are beautiful. Cary also helped to make several adjustments to fit options that would offer the best use of space for the size we had to work with. It was a bit scary to order cabinets that we had not seen or touched in person, but based on recommendations and discussions with Cary, we went with Designs for Living, and it turned out amazing.

Cary was wonderful. Although out of state, she came highly recommended. She visited with us once or twice, and we spoke over the phone, emailed, and texted many times. She was very responsive. My contractor said that the cabinets were by far the best quality he had ever seen. You will be very pleased with her work, her attention to detail, and friendly personality!

Cary provided kitchen design services, as well as custom cabinetry (kitchen, dining room, family room built-ins, kid's office & mudroom) for our first floor renovation. We are extremely happy with the quality and design of the cabinets. She is very easy to work with and detail oriented. She listened to what we wanted and implemented it very well in her design. She also gave very helpful, practical advice. She was very responsive and always willing to work within our budget. She suggested changes that helped keep us in budget while not sacrificing the utility and design we were aiming for.

I loved working with Cary on our whole house renovation in the Washington DC area. She designed cabinetry for our entire kitchen, three bathrooms, and beautiful large closets for our formal living room that elegantly house a hidden mudroom full of space! Cary was truly wonderful at patiently listening to and skilled at drawing out what I was trying to achieve in each space. She had great ideas for how to smartly lay out the kitchen and I am grateful every day for how well the space functions. She also executed beautifully on creating a master bath vanity and double medicine cabinet surround based on a picture I had found. I loved how seamlessly she worked with both our architect and our builder to make sure that everything would fit just right. Cary was a pleasure to work with and I would highly recommend her!

Cary was wonderful to work with! She had a vision for our kitchen that was perfect for us but also gave us several options along with very detailed and imaginative drawings. She was also very helpful in finding resources for us I.e. cabinets, hardware, and fixtures. She also connected us with our contractor who worked out perfectly for the job! We highly recommend Cary for designing your kitchen!

We worked with Cary on 3 different projects....our master bathroom, Kitchen/Dining room and second upstairs bathroom. For each project we relied heavily on her expertise and guidance. We described our needs in detail and for each project she came back with designs that were not only within our budget, but beyond what we could have imagined. She designed all our cabinetry and really helped to narrow down the seemingly infinite choices to focusing in on what we would love which saved a ton of time. We were particularly overwhelmed when it came to Kitchen backsplash tile options and thought we wanted a colored glass look, but she brought us to the tile store and pointed us in a direction that was so interesting and unique that we would have never considered without her eye. Even after 7 years it's still our favorite part of our beautiful kitchen.

I worked with Cary, the owner of Designs for Living on two of my kitchens. One a more traditional, the other a contemporary design. Both projects turned out beautifully, both kitchens are in an open floor plan and became the focal point of the space. Cary understood my vision and contributed her invaluable insights and ideas to make my dream kitchens reality. She was open to my quirky ideas and even more, she was excited about them as the kitchen would be her own! When it comes to cabinets, if you can think of it, she can make it - I wanted to have cabinets without pulls - she recommended c-channel, I wanted all uniform horizontal front panels, she figured out how to make it happen even on our double dishwasher drawers. Her cabinet makers provide high quality cabinets with attention to every detail. I highly recommend Designs for Living for anyone who is looking for high quality custom kitchen designs and a wonderful, experienced, talented and fun designer to work with.Thank you Cary!

After interviewing several professional kitchen designers, we chose Cary for two reasons: •Cary truly listened to us and considered herself part of a team. She was open to our ideas and our budget, was not intent on selling us a particular product and brought no “agenda” to the planning process. Even so, if we needed guidance, she was happy to step in with suggestions she thought would appeal to us and would work in our space. •She was willing to work with our kitchen’s quirky footprint and creatively use what was there to maximize our space. We got tired of hearing “blow out that load-bearing wall”, the single solution offered by the others, which would have nearly doubled our project’s cost and ruined the original character of our home. Her solution was creative and spot-on. By relocating a doorway, we vastly increased the amount of usable cabinet and counter space. No other designer suggested this solution. She was available and treated our project as a home, not a job site. When there was a delay installing the cabinets, she agreed to store them off site until the space was ready, even though it was not her fault. The quote she provided many months prior to the actual start date did not change and the terms of payment were clear. We would recommend Cary without hesitation.

Cary designed a fabulous new kitchen for us. She listened to our wants and needs and incorporated them into a stylish, practical design that looks fabulous and works extremely well. She's professional, approachable, available and always honest. She worked for us in unusual circumstances -- she's in Chicago and we are in suburban Washington DC, but the design was flawless and she was able to work well with the contractor, who despite some skepticism about this arrangement came away very impressed with her work.

Cary Mclean recently did a kitchen and a bathroom renovation in my 100+ year old bungalow in the Oak Park River Forest area. The kitchen was very awkward and dark but Cary's design opened up walls, added windows and added storage which made the kitchen bright, beautiful, and much more functional. The kitchen design makes the space very easy to work in as well as adding family space for meals, homework and entertaining. Cary personally helped me select cabinet styles, hardware, tiles and wall color. Her bathroom design also added storage and is just a beautiful space. Cary orders her custom cabinets from Mennonite cabinet makers; the cabinets are beautiful and of the finest quality. Both designs maintain a traditional look in keeping with the age of the house but bring modern conveniences to two of the most important rooms in the home.

We have been working with Cary from Designs for Living for a little over two months now. She has taken our kitchen remodel from good to Wow. She is an expert in kitchen design and functional layout. She has given us several variations of plans - taking us through the pros and cons of each of the designs. She listens to what we want and has been able to get us out of the box we had put ourselves into in the initial phases of the project. We now have a plan that we are excited to implement and in the end we will have a wonderful open kitchen to work with that will still be in character with our 1924 bungalow. When our project is complete we will post photos.