5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ... top trends in kitchen redesign

Are you considering remodeling your kitchen or building one in a new home and want to know what will keep it from looking dated in a short time?

Sub-Zero/Wolf, manufacturer of high-end refrigeration and cooking appliances, held its annual Kitchen Design Contest in the spring with leading designers and architects as judges. One of them was renowned Chicago-based kitchen designer Mick De Giulio of de Giulio kitchen design. He and Paul Leuthe, corporate marketing manager for Sub-Zero/Wolf, are sharing five of the top trends spotted in the 1,046 contest entries submitted by kitchen designers nationwide.

1. Throw out the cookie-cutter: The biggest kitchen trend is no all-encompassing trend, says Leuthe, who has been observing the room's evolution for 13 years. Kitchen designs today "tend to take on the personalities of the people who live in them. A kitchen may relate to a trip a homeowner took to Tuscany, and now they want a Tuscan-style kitchen. People want to do a unique thing. They ... are more interested in a 'personality design.' Now instead of one tear sheet from a magazine, they come in with 20 of them, saying I want stools from that picture, the island from this one."

2. Size matters: While 200 to 300 square feet used to be considered a large kitchen, today 400 to 600 feet is not uncommon," says De Giulio.

3. Mix it up: We mean design elements as well as materials. In De Giulio's new Beaux Arts line for SieMatic, classic styles are mixed with traditional and very modern looks. And, instead of an enormous expanse of granite, designers are using different elements within one stretch of countertop. "We're using onyxes, German nickel, pewter, glass countertops, even mixes such as limestone and clay," says De Giulio. "We're mixing it all together, but not a lot of one thing [in one application]."

4. Counter intelligence: For a long time, marble was avoided for fear of staining. But that's changing. "There used to be 80 square feet of granite in the kitchen and after a while it looked uninteresting," De Giulio says. "Women wanting new kitchens say, 'We don't want granite.' It is overdone," he says. The new granite? Marble. "We are using a lot of marble," De Giulio says. "Now people are coming around to the idea it lasts a long time."

5. Long shelf life: "What I am trying to do is break away from the over-detailed ... look more and more, so the kitchen has a long life," De Giulio says. "The greatest compliment you can have is when a kitchen done 10 years ago looks like it was done today."