Home-A-Rama

Yesterday we enjoyed our "date day" by visiting Home-A-Rama. This is something they do each fall in our area. Developers and builders pick a location, build amazing million or multi-million dollar homes there, decorate them, and show them off. Then they sell them and build up the rest of the neighbourhood. This year, based on the economy (we think), Home-A-Rama was a lot smaller than in past years. Sometimes they have 20 or so homes, this year only seven. We thoroughly love looking around and seeing what's new and cool and totally beyond our reach! Like Brian said to a friend "We decided not to buy this year" Har har.

Trends we found in every house: 1) a laundry room on every floor, so as not to carry clothes all around the house. 2) a combo laundry room and office, on the main floor. We could not figure that one out. 3) Huge wine 'cellars' (glassed in rooms) off the kitchen. Gorgeous!
4) of course, a second floor entertainment room with a tv that is bigger than my current home.
5) extensive outdoor living areas, with pools, pool houses, built in bars, bbq's and porches.

This house was my favourite from the outside. I am always partial to the 'castle' look, with stone and a turret.

Side view of my fave exterior

This house had humongous rooms, but was decorated VERY weird. Everything was bright blue and aqua coloured, with a dolphin/mermaid theme. Kinda gross.

I believe this house was the smallest. It felt very small in comparison to the others.

This house did not feel too large, but had 5 full baths and 3 half baths. Yikes.

A gorgeous home

A cute sitting room in that home, the only place in the house with the exterior brick showing through.

For some reason I didn't get this Ivory house from a front shot. Oh well. It was pretty ugly from the outside, the columns were a little too much. The inside was very well laid out, but it was decorated very italian/greek...with mirrored and glass furniture, mirrored walls, mirrored everything. It had a master bathroom that you would never have to leave!

The last house we looked at ended up being our all around favourite. It was the 'green house' too, it was a concrete home, and had solar panels and such. I didn't pay too much attention to that speech.

Deck off the master bedroom, in the back of the house

They always had floor plans for each home on display.

The back view of the house.

Our fave feature, when you entered the front door there was a huge island which was a double staircase going upstairs, and behind that was the great room, and above the great room was an amazing library that went all the way around the whole big 'hole in the floor'. It was an incredibly inefficient use of space, but very impressive.

The floors in the kitchen and great room were brick and herringbone (I think that's what Brian called it) would be weird to clean maybe?

All things considered, this house had a very functional but modest kitchen (er, main kitchen). The not-so-modest part...It also had a huge glassed in wine room between the kitchen and dining room, and a butler's kitchen (not pantry, kitchen!) off the doorway you can see in the corner of the picture.

Looking from the library down to the living room