A Retro Blue Kitchen in a Chicago-Area Home

Interior designer and HGTV Design Star winner Tiffany Brooks walks us through the kitchen of her Grayslake, Illinois home — a white kitchen she could live with on day one, then injected with all her personality and color.

Tiffany bathed everything in a light blue from Farrow & Ball for a retro, glamorous, Sex-and-the-City vibe, right down to painting the cabinets — a trick she recommends to clients on a tight renovation budget.

She found her "I-will" lights at West Elm and added their little sisters over the breakfast table, where $50 church-rummage-sale chairs wear a fabric so expensive she jokes anyone who spills on it gets banished from the house.

The details are pure Tiffany: a custom dual-color baby-blue-and-white refrigerator, a rolling bar for her signature "champagne everything" cocktails, a slushie machine for frozen fruit-juice mocktails, and a lavender-latte habit she picked up from Jimmy Butler's coffee shop.

She's currently upgrading to the gold-trimmed Café appliance suite she's used for clients for years. The island offers tons of roll-out storage — the first time, she admits, she's ever felt organized in a kitchen.