After spending a much needed break in the Delaware River Valley, I think I actually learned a few things about what’s essential for a country home. Having lived in both San Francisco and New York over the past 12 years, I’ve unfortunately not spent too much time outside of an urban environment. Here are our must-haves for practical, yet glamorous country living:
Kitchens and bathrooms are by far the most important rooms in the house when it comes to remodeling, selling and buying. Interest in these highly specialized and technical areas of the home gobbles up a huge portion of HGTV and DIY Web sites, and is a specialty among designers like me.
Thomas Kostigen shows how to save water not just by turning off the tap, but through discovering “virtual water,” or the water embedded in the products we use every day. By making better decisions about which food, clothes, and household necessities to use, each of us can save thousands of gallons of water—and help avert the water crisis unfolding around the globe.
Put simply, an induction-cooker element (“burner”) is a powerful, high-frequency electromagnet, with the electromagnetism generated by sophisticated electronics in the “element” under the unit’s ceramic surface. When a good-sized piece of magnetic material such as a stainless steel skillet is placed in the magnetic field that the element is generating, the field transfers (“induces”) energy into that metal.
lobby
We were greeted in the sweeping lobby by Tim Button, the interior designer for the public spaces. He discussed the elements used in the Lobby’s interiors, such as FSC Certified end cut Douglas Fir wood floors, natural fiber carpets, and locally quarried limestone which brings the exterior materials inside.
5 Sustainable Kitchen Design Tips for your Home
This year, clean up your act with Electrolux’s new Kelly (as in Ripa) Green washer and dryer.
The limited-edition shade, an upbeat green that packs a visual punch, hints at the machines’ abundant ecofriendliness: Electrolux washers use up to 83 percent less energy and 56 percent less water than your old-school model, with an optional ecofriendly cycle that slashes energy usage by 43 percent.
