Take a look at this Colonial-style home built in 1906 in Seattle, Washington, with Craftsman-like woodwork and built-ins. It’s been updated throughout and the new kitchen was once named Seattle Homes & Lifestyles magazine’s “Kitchen of the Year.”

The listing says: “Exquisite renovation of a turn-of-the-century Colonial on stately corner lot. Box beam ceilings, period millwork & built-ins. ”

Most of the woodwork was painted white. I’d love to see the “before” photos.

There are 4 bedrooms and 3 baths in this nearly 5,000 square-foot house.

“JAS Design-Build remodel with reclaimed Madrona wood island won Seattle Homes & Lifestyles 2007 Kitchen of the Year.”

The finished lower level has a small kitchen and a walk-out to the yard:

“Sound, city & mountain views across the street from Volunteer Park.” Wow.

Like what they’ve done with it? Asking price is $2.98 million. For more photos and information check the listing with Kim Knowles at Windermere.

Did you see this one?

A Craftsman in Mount Baker Gets a New (Old) Look

Ever wish you could live in the pages of a Restoration Hardware catalog? This extensively remodeled Craftsman in the Meyerland area of Houston, Texas, looks like one to me. I’ve seen a lot of houses staged to sell but this one takes it to a whole new level. See what you think:

The house has a very masculine and moody vibe, but it’s kind of whimsical, too, starting with the front porch and the cigar store Indian:

As I was first scrolling through these photos and thought, “Have I stumbled into a Restoration Hardware store?” Then I read the listing description, which notes the similarity.

I believe those are Bellocq tea canisters on the kitchen shelves:

The house has 4 bedrooms and 3 baths.

You can see more photos of the property at Cottage Neighborhood. For more information go to RESTO Homes, which remodeled the house and staged it. Photos by Rockbait Tours.

Do you like the Restoration Hardware look? If you could live inside the pages of any home decor catalog, which one would it be?

More Creative Home Staging:

Areader named Katie wrote me about this renovation: “My husband and I bought this amazing property known as The Brady House, a 1910 Arts & Crafts house with City Landmark designation in Austin’s Judges Hill neighborhood.” Here’s how it looks now:

They own Avenue B Development, a remodeling and development company focused on historic house renovations.

Front Entry Before:

Front Entry After:

Singer Carole King lived here in the late 70s. She played this 1899 Wissner piano when she was renting the house. How cool that it’s still there!

The staircase and entry aren’t the only things that got a makeover. The piano is looking a lot better, too:

Living Room Fireplace Before:

Living Room Fireplace After:

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen After:

Eat-In Corner Before:

After:

For more photos and information about The Brady House project, you can see a slideshow of the house and visit their Restoration Blog.

Now that it’s finished, it’s on the market–check the listing for all the details. Thanks, Katie!

P.S. Love dramatic makeovers like this one? Visit my Before & After page!

Another Great Reno Project:

A Bungalow in Atlanta (See the After!)

This lake-front house in Minnesota may have been built in 2002, but it was designed with traditional Craftsman style. Their attention to detail with the woodwork is amazing. You just don’t see a lot of new houses that look like this.

The house has about 4,000 square feet and 3 stories.

The agent with Edina Realty says:

An authentic Arts & Crafts jewel in which every elevation and every room is replete with period design & detail. Park-like grounds on premier shoreline on the west side of Gull Lake. This national award-winning home was designed by architect Paul Hirst of Oldham Hirst Design and painstakingly constructed in 2001 by Nor-Son; the premier builder of the Brainerd Lakes Area.”

“Every elevation and every room is replete with period design, details and fixtures such as columned porches, handcrafted oil-rubbed bronze chandeliers, quarter-sawn oak paneling and cabinets, and stained glass and tile art mosaics. Truly in a class of its own.”

I’ve always dreamed of having a lake house. If I did, I’d want a sunroom and lots of porches with views of the water like this house has.

Only steps to the water…

For more photos and information visit Edina Realty, which has it listed for $1.65 million. Thanks to Kim for telling me about it. If you love Craftsman-style houses, click here to see more!

P.S. Does Gull Lake make anyone else think of Gull Cottage or is it just me?

Gull Cottage from The Ghost & Mrs. Muir

We’ve taken a lot of house tours together on my blog over the past 12 months, so I thought it would be interesting to see which ones were the most popular, getting the most comments, clicks, and shares. I think it tells a lot about my readers that more cottages than mansions made the list.

With a drumroll, please, here are the Top 10 Houses of 2012: 

10. A Beach Hut where Kate Winslet Vacations and Demi Moore Filmed a Movie

9. Brooke Giannetti’s Romantic Shingle-Style House

8. Suzanne Kasler’s English-Country Style in the Mountains

7. A New House in Cape Cod Built to Look Like Grey Gardens

6. Croatan Cottage: A Beautifully Restored Kit House in North Carolina

5. Fig Tree Cottage For Sale: White Picket Fence Included

4. A Storybook Tudor in Oakland

3. An Old School House Becomes a Cheerful Cottage in the Catskills

2. A House Built with Turn-of-the-Century Details in Ocean City

1. The Story of a 1925 Craftsman Cottage in Mississippi

Did any of your favorites make the list? Several of mine did. I’m always partial to houses that belong to my readers, like Fig Tree Cottage, and to fellow bloggers like Brooke.

When a reader told me about this charming renovated Craftsman-style house “in the heart of downtown Bellevue,” I was sold as soon as I saw the front porch. It’s known as the Frank Odle house, and the owners spent 8 years restoring and updating it. It’s on the market for $1,199,950–take a look:

The house has 3 bedrooms and 3 baths and a little over 3,000 square feet.

Love all the built-ins that the house has.

Want it? For more photos and information, check Michael White’s listing at Windermere. (Thanks, Kim!) On Sundays I feature interesting houses that are on the market. You can see more of them at Sunday Open House.

Hooked on Craftsmans? One of my Favorites:

The Story of Erin’s Craftsman Cottage in Mississippi

Back in 2008 I featured this striking gray Craftsman in South Pasadena. That was before gray was a full-on trend and before yellow doors were popping up all over Pinterest. The interiors were unexpected, too, with pale wood floors and white-painted woodwork. Some readers loved it. Other readers, well, didn’t. It became one of my most-read and most-discussed posts ever.

So I was pretty excited to come across an article about it in the L.A. Times that includes some before photos showing how it looked before its trendy renovation:

It looked a lot smaller with those dark and muddy colors, that’s for sure.

Here’s how it looked on the Home Shoot Home website where I found it back in ’08:

Designer Tamara Kaye-Honey (House of Honey) is responsible for updating the 1911 bungalow. She told the L.A. Times that her mission was to update it to better suit a young family:

I wanted the home to feel personal and fresh. It was to have a clean, whimsical and modern aesthetic while allowing the architecture to have a strong presence. The color palette is crisp and playful, with shades of yellow carried throughout the interior and exterior to unify.

Here’s how dark and traditional the interiors were before:

And now:

The fireplace before:

And now:

Everything’s a lot lighter and brighter, that’s for sure. Here’s how the kitchen looked when they started:

And now:

The L.A. Times says, “Purists may flinch, but the Douglas fir was painted a glossy white to open up the space and create the ambience of a summer cottage.”

I sure had a lot of purists flinching after my 2008 post about it. As a newbie blogger, I was amazed by the number of comments that poured in about the house at the time.

If it makes you feel better, in the comments of the article, a woman named Traci (I’m guessing the homeowner) explained:

75% of the painted wood is new to match the small amount of original architectural detail. The original stained Douglas fir wood only existed in the living room, dining room and inglenook (before we reconfigured the spaces) and was in terrible condition and needed some serious fixing.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally get the purists and agree with salvaging historical homes but this was by no means a special craftsman. The house ended up having significantly more craftsman detail once it was renovated.

Visit the L.A. Times article by Lisa Boone for more before and after photos, as well as more details about the reno. Photos by Cliff Norton.

What do you think? Are you loving its trendy fresh look or wishing they had left more of its original character? The exterior makeover is my favorite part. Love those cheerful yellow doors!

You can see more of the house in my original post, including the charming detached-garage-turned-studio that sits behind it (that I wish I could work in!), here:

A Remodeled Craftsman Bungalow: Too White or Just Right?

Singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow opened the doors to her 1920s Spanish Revival home in the Hollywood Hills for a spread in Architectural Digest last year. Now she’s selling it and the two other houses on the 11-acre property for about $16 million. I always love it when we get to see more of an estate like this. Let’s look!

The main house, where Sheryl lives with her sons Wyatt and Levi, was built in 1924. She bought it first, in the late 1990s. Two years later, she acquired the bungalow and cottage nearby and created her own private compound.

In this photo from AD, Sheryl’s dog Oscar guards the front door:

The Spanish tile on the staircase is original to the house:

I’m a “book person,” so I love the little library with the windows:

No sign of the dining room in the listing photos, but here’s one from the magazine shoot:

The listing boasts a “chef’s kitchen.” I’m kinda baffled by this one and only photo of it, which doesn’t do it any favors:

I had to go back and see how it looked in AD. I guess it’s the same one, but I had to scroll back and forth a lot of times trying to figure it out:

The house has 4 bedrooms and 3.5 baths.

What we didn’t get to see in Architectural Digest was the Craftsman guest house on the property, built in 1909. In my original post about the estate I wrote, “Wish we could see that one!” I had to wait a year, but here it is…

It has 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, and “vistas of Hollywood.”

They must have been having a sale on rugs when she was furnishing the living room. All the woodwork in the house is beautiful.

For more photos and information, check the listing by Myra Nourmand of Nourmand & Associates and read the article by Mayer Rus in Architectural Digest (photography by Roger Davies and Jim McHugh).

You can see my original post about it here: Sheryl Crow’s Romantic Hollywood House.

P.S. I also wrote about Crow’s Cross Creek Farm in Nashville.

When I think of that house, it’s the fish tank in the kitchen that I remember!

This house was built in 1912 in Mount Baker, an urban neighborhood of Seattle known for its Craftsman-style houses and popular biennial Home Tour. As you can see, she was a Plain Jane with the front door kind of hidden on one side of the house and shutters that weren’t right for the period or style.

But it underwent an extensive reno this year and looks beautiful now. Take a look:

Wow. Right? I love that new front porch. They had to pretty much strip everything down to the bones and start over.

Meredith from the real estate company Heaton Dainard sent me these photos and explains, “Our selling agent Jason Howdeshell researches thousands of properties in Seattle each week to find houses that are uninhabitable or severely outdated but located in a coveted area that can be renovated and put back on the market.”

They wanted to maintain the look of the period, so they included plenty of moldings and built-ins that were long gone.

“The rehab and funding was managed entirely by Will Heaton and James Dainard, and the entire process took under 6 months.”

Katie Kepler is the listing agent for the property, which was listed for $949,000. It went on the market last week and is already pending.

The views don’t hurt, either:

Visit Heaton Dainard for more photos and information about the house. (Thanks, Meredith!) To see more beautiful Craftsman houses I’ve featured, click here.

P.S. Here’s another reno of theirs I flipped for:

Renovating a Small House from the 1920s

When a reader named Erin sent me photos of her 1925 Craftsman Cottage in Laurel, Mississippi, I got a case of serious house envy. I loved not only the house itself but hearing the story behind it, too, so I’m excited she said I could share it with you. Take a look!

The George F. Haynes house, as it’s known, is home to Erin and Ben Napier. I’ll let Erin tell you all about it now, in her words…

“When I was in junior high school, I fell in love with the yellow craftsman cottage in Laurel’s historic district, just across from Mississippi’s first art museum, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.

“As a budding artist in my high school years, I would come downtown to draw the beautiful architecture, and I would daydream about making that unassuming yellow cottage my home one day.”

“When I would come home to visit during college, I would take long walks in the historic district with my boyfriend, Ben, who would later become my husband, and we would choose our dream houses.

“When I graduated with an art degree from Ole Miss in 2007, we were soon married and before long I started Lucky Luxe Couture Correspondence, a letterpress wedding stationery studio from our loft apartment just 2 blocks from the yellow cottage.

“We loved our loft, a former toothpaste factory in WWII, but before long the business outgrew the confines of a home office and Lucky Luxe became an international success in the wedding world.”

“We idly began thinking of buying houses, daydreaming really. My husband is the student minister at our church in downtown Laurel and we learned that one of our favorite parishioners was the owner of the yellow cottage. For fun, we knocked on her door one day and she invited us in to take a look around.

“It was a like a brand new house since its remodel after hurricane Katrina, and she had it decorated in a beautifully formal, Southern style with buttery yellow walls. We, jokingly, told her if she ever wanted to sell the house to call us because we’d love to buy it. And she called us a week later with a price we couldn’t refuse. And we bought our dream house, the yellow craftsman cottage, in September 2011.”

“We learned the fascinating history of the home. Lauren Eastman Rogers, son of one of our city’s affluent and industrious founding fathers, was newly married in the early 1920s and shortly thereafter died tragically of appendicitis at the age of 23.

“They were in the midst of building a home on the site of the art museum at the time, and his heartbroken bride couldn’t bear the thought of living in it alone or anyone else living in it either. Rumor has it that she ordered the partially completed home to be dismantled, and a local contractor used the salvage of the Rogers’ home to build our house for the city’s first dentist, George F. Haynes, in 1925.

“The home is now in the directory of downtown Laurel’s architectural styles as the best example of craftsman architecture in our city. Lauren Rogers became the namesake of the first art museum in Mississippi, which was built on the site of his home as a memorial.”

“In the living room, we had a contractor build simple bookcases the entire length of the wall, which we are slowly filling with white and cream hardback books and objects from our travels and from our family history.”

“Books are especially important to us and act as decor just as much as literature in our home. The coffee table is a factory cart, the striped cotton rug is from Dash and Albert, and the end table is an old chopping block found at the Salvage Market in Jackson, Mississippi.”

“The kitchen wasn’t damaged in the hurricane and thus had not seen a remodel since the 1980s, so that’s where we began. The room was dollhouse cutesy, with scalloped cutouts framing the windows and formica countertops, white appliances placed awkwardly in the layout, with the refrigerator sticking out in the walkway.”

“We did as much of the renovation as possible ourselves, keeping with a simple, basic timeless style that would (hopefully) be in style forever. We did absolutely everything for as little money as possible, and all of our decor was either found (free) or from a flea market. We’re pretty thrifty.”

“Ben built a custom cabinet around our new stainless refrigerator, the butcher block countertops were a bargain from IKEA, the cast iron enamel sink was a vintage find from Ben’s mom, the mercury glass pendants are suspended from old cotton factory pulleys, and the subway tile was a closeout steal for $60.”

“All of the knobs are mismatched and from an architectural salvage shop in Boston. The owner tells us the pulls and knobs came from pharmacies and schoolhouses around New England, our favorite vacation spot every fall. Some are copper, some are painted and chipping, and each one is my absolute favorite one.”

“The 8′ dining room table was built by Ben from old deck boards and my parents’ old front porch columns.”

“The chairs were collected at flea markets, and the original 1876 centennial flag was an estate sale find for $3. An oil portrait of my daddy’s dove hunting dog from the 1970s hangs in there, along with a WWII red cross poster and a watercolor drawing of our house that I made earlier this year.”

“The stairwell had a bold floral wallpaper above the handrail and faux leather wallpaper below with carpeted stairs, and Ben made panel moulding that we painted to match the rest of the trim in the house.”

Here’s how the stairwell looked when they were working on it:

“We hired a specialist to refinish the heart pine stair treads, and the stairwell became a bright, sunshiny space in the center of our cottage, leading to 2 bedrooms and a Jack and Jill bath upstairs, which we are currently working on finishing.”

“We painted the wooden handrails glossy black, then hung a pendant lantern from Ballard Designs.”

“A collection of vintage mirrors hang grouped in our bedroom, and an armoire built by my daddy and Ben from a door that was in my grandfather’s barn, houses his clothes. We found the old painted cedar chest at a flea market in Meridian, Mississippi. The bed linens are mismatched textures in shades of white and cream. 2 antique cameos sit perched on an old door frame above our iron bed.”

“We painted each room in Sherwin Williams’ Dover White with the exception of the Entryway (Java, Eddie Bauer) and the hallway (Nantucket Grey, Benjamin Moore).

“We were careful to choose every decorative element with a story personal to us, nothing pretty for the sake of it, but because we have some personal connection to it.”

“Nearly every wall in our house displays sepia photos of our grandparents and ancestors, reminders of who we come from. We see each other everyday, so rather than hang photos of ourselves we wanted to surround ourselves with the loved ones who made us into who we are now, whom we can no longer see.”

“In the office, we hung some of our collection of vintage maps, places we loved so much we had to bring home a little of it to Mississippi. IKEA’s affordable slipcovered Ektorp sofas are in our living room and office along with an old oak teacher’s desk found on Craigslist for $50.”

“Off the kitchen is the laundry room, which was a small porch that was taken in decades ago, with tile floors and clapboard walls. Ben made built-ins for storage and a bench with space for shoes and boots beneath. It is now a laundry/mud room that’s much more usable.”

Ben built this door himself because the opening isn’t a standard size:

“I’ve been compiling inspiration images for my dream home since 9th grade, and I was amazed when I discovered my idea folder last year. My taste hasn’t changed at all, with airy white interiors and solid, wooden pieces anchoring the rooms. I think I’ll always be happy with our design choices since our style is not inspired by trends but by history.”

Wasn’t that a fun tour? Many thanks to Erin for showing us around and telling us the stories behind her house! She’s the proprietress & designer behind Lucky Luxe Couture Correspondence. You can follow her on her blog, too.

Hooked on Craftsmans?

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• The Craftsman in Zathura
• Reviving a Craftsman in Portland
• More!