With kitchen cabinetry, insisting on a certain look can add more to the cost than most homeowners realize. It can be like paying $3,000 extra to get a car painted red instead of taking the same model in blue. Functional upgrades to cabinetry will make daily life easier. Kitchen designer Bart Bauer shows you how to make sensible choices, save money and still love your new kitchen.

Designing a new kitchen to be kid-friendly is surprisingly easy, doesn’t add to the cost, and it’s a great way to help your children develop healthy eating habits and learn to cook. Homeowners may fret that the modifications would only be needed for a few years, but they can also make kitchen duty easier for adults.

Resale or brand-new house, the kitchen is the first stop for most prospective buyers and often the reason they choose one house over another. As they look and linger, what questions should they be asking themselves?

Can you spend $2,200 on a dishwasher? Yes, but you may have a hard time finding a dealer’s floor model to check out. Lower your sights by $700 and you will find dealers with floor models wherever you live. I checked out a $1,550 Miele, a $1,600 Bosch, a $1,550 Kenmore Elite and a $1,500 KitchenAid.

For Americans, British designer Johnny Grey’s unconventional kitchens are a radical departure from convention. They feature jazzy colors, original artwork, playful, custom cabinetry best described as “sculptural” and work areas that are carefully tailored to a client’s body measurements. He developed his signature style after becoming seriously ill early in his career.

Though British designer Johnny Grey isn’t well known by the American public, his ideas have influenced kitchen design in this country for more than 20 years. He introduced the "unfitted" kitchen, featuring an assortment of unusually shaped, non-matching, custom-built cabinets, emphasizing what he calls "soft geometry.”

Reduce stress for a special someone with a carefully selected gift. Suggestions include a KitchenAid Instant Hot Water Dispenser; a quiet-running Broan High Performance Range Hood; and a quiet-running Insinkerator Evolution Excel Disposal.

Those fabulous-looking kitchens in most builders’ models can be impossible to work in. Before you fall for one, check for function. The most critical element is the layout. The counters, appliances and sink should be arranged so you can prepare a meal with a minimum of steps. You’ll also need an adequate food-prep area near the sink and stove, good lighting and plenty of storage.

In many cases, the desire to move to a bigger house is driven by the need to “get my life under control.” The thinking goes like this: In a bigger house I’ll have bigger closets and my house won’t be awash in clutter anymore. But bigger closets can be both a blessing and a curse, said Messies Anonymous founder Sandra Felton, who struggled with chaos in her own house for more than 23 years before devising strategies for neatness that work.

Norwegian designer Peter Opsvik’s chairs don’t look like anything you have in your house or have ever tried out in a furniture store. Their novel shapes let you move, squirm, fidget, turn, rock, twist and tilt. Opsvik says he allows for such a wide range of movements because even though most adults spend most of their days sitting, “no one stands or sits like a statue.”

Introduced in 1956, the Eames lounge chair may be the most comfortable chair in the world. Curved and playful in profile, it incorporated principles of ergonomics before the word came into common use. Katherine had yearned to own an Eames since she graduated from architecture school 30 years ago—and now she’s scored one in the secondhand market.

The variety of televisions on the market today is mind-boggling. There are different types, an enormous range in screen size, and nuances in picture quality and resolution to satisfy the most persnickety movie buff or the sports nut who wants to watch instant replay with minimal blurring. And there’s a price to fit almost every homeowner’s budget.

Local artisans can add a custom touch to a new house for a surprisingly affordable price. The only hitch is that they are often small, one-person operations, and they can be hard to locate. In Ann Arbor, Mich., where I live, I found a brother and sister team who make tiles, a potter who can make sinks, and two muralists.

Over the last 40 years Bill Stumpf has transformed the office environment with ergonomically designed chairs that are comfortable and help you to perform your job more effectively. In a recent interview, he said most people have yet to apply the lessons learned about chair comfort at work to their furniture choices at home. There is plenty of comfortable, ergonomically sound furniture available, but most people put looks first.