A look at what’s on the cutting edge in home design

The beauty of the mountains inspires people in Stowe to re-create that feeling in their homes.

That can mean adding windows so we can keep more of the outdoors in our lives even when we’re inside, or simply designing spaces that inspire the same awe.

Each person’s eclectic tastes involve a different artful eye, but some definite trends are emerging for interior design, in particular the most functional yet most lived-in rooms in the house: kitchens and bathrooms.

From the inside out

Kathy Devers, who owns Design Studio of Stowe, has been in the local interior design business for 34 years. She started working with her father — who specialized in window treatments, even sewing them himself — when her kids were small and she needed part-time work.

It became clear to Devers that she had what it took to succeed.

She has made over innumerable rooms and homes in Stowe over the last three decades. Recently, she says, she’s seen people trending toward wide-open spaces and relaxing vibes.

She took us through a kitchen she recently renovated in a home on Putnam Forest Road. Originally, the kitchen had only two small windows; at the owner’s request, Devers’ team opened up almost the wall’s entire width above the sink to big glass windows.

“It’s a fantastic view of the mountain,” Devers said.

Devers also opened up the formal dining room and turned it into part of the kitchen, replacing its table with a second island.

The idea is simple: The kitchen is where people gather. Formal dining rooms have fallen out of use as busy families and groups of close friends choose instead to congregate in the kitchen.

The original kitchen island in the Putnam Forest Road house serves as cooking space while the second island beckons conversation and bonding around the table.

“That way, people can hang out in the kitchen away from her cooking,” Devers said. “We’re actually redistributing the tasks” of cooking, cleaning and spending time with company, she said.

To perpetuate the idea that a kitchen is just as much living space as the rest of the house, Devers built benches into the walls, saving space and making the kitchen more inviting.

Aesthetically, the kitchen is done in neutrals with a minimum of details. “It’s open and clean,” Devers said, pointing out drawers that blend into their surroundings without decorative pulls. “You don’t get tired of it. It’s restful.”

Popular neutral tones include white, gray, silver and blue-gray, Devers said.

Exquisite details

Venture into the bathrooms Devers has worked on recently and that open, airy feeling continues.

She takes us through a house on Main Street in Hyde Park that was built in 1907 and needed a little updating — the bathroom in particular.

“I had just come back from Paris,” she recalled, “and they do their kitchens and bathrooms beautifully there. They’re small, as big as a minute,” but exquisitely detailed, Devers said, and her Parisian inspiration is easy to see in the Hyde Park house’s bathroom.

It’s full of mirrors and has a brand-new window, which she says make it feel bigger than it is, and since the shower is surrounded in glass, the room doesn’t feel partitioned — a nod to the open feeling she was going for in the kitchen on Putnam Forest Road. The shelves are white, topped with a marble countertop.

As popular as stone has always been, Devers’ clients are leaning towards man-made materials now — they’re easier to clean, she said, and are much lower-maintenance than natural materials, which can crack, degrade or require repairs.

“Natural materials are still here, but man-made materials are easier to manage,” and their quality is better than it was years ago, Devers said.

Originally, her Putnam Forest Road clients shied away from vinyl, saying it reminded them of their parents’ vinyl furniture, but once they saw the quality of today’s synthetics, they opted to use it.

Graham Rogers, who owns Downeast Tile in Stowe with his father corroborated Devers’ observations.

“Porcelain wood-look tiles are No. 1 right now,” Rogers said. “People want their rustic Vermont look, they want real stuff, but the man-made stuff is huge. It won’t warp or scratch,” Rogers said, and it holds up better to radiant heating than natural wood.

Rogers says, quirkily, Downeast Tile is seeing more and more people coming in for black-and-white hexagonal tiles, like in the 1970s. “It sparks something in their brains,” Rogers said. “It reminds them of when they were kids growing up. It’s not huge, but it’s definitely there.”

As for building trends on the outside, builder Tim Meehan says the large, open bathroom concept isn’t going away. His firm, Tim Meehan Builders in Stowe, has been asked to enlarge master bathrooms to keep the shower and tub — regulation tubs, no multiple-person Jacuzzis, which Meehan calls “so ’80s” — separate, along with creating “master suites” with sitting areas.