National Kitchen and Bath Show in Chicago

The Country Home offices last week were buzzing with anticipation—and, frankly, some relief—over the National Kitchen and Bath Association big annual show in downtown Chicago (www.nkba.com). Our building and design editor, Meredith Ladik (a.k.a., Shopgirl), along with a cast of other editors and designers, has been hard—and we mean hard—at work for months getting ready. KBIS, as it's commonly known, is primarily a trade show our staff attends each year to get the jump on new kitchen and bath products, colors, and trends that will soon be in stores. KBIS is a bit like a runway fashion show or the big Detroit auto show where we see all the cool—and sometimes over-the-top—new stuff coming to the marketplace during the course of the year. It's also a great chance to find out what the long-term trends are in color, finishes, and materials.

Walking around the show, you see everything from work boots and well-worn jeans on the tens of thousands of contractors there to expensive imported suits and heels on the high-end builders and buyers. By the end of the show, your feet are aching, your notebook is crammed with hastily scribbled notes, and your head is swimming with all the new things you've seen. But for us, it's one of the coolest shows of the year, and it's a great place to find ideas to fix that stuck-in-a-time-warp kitchen or bath.

In future issues, we'll be showing you what we think is the best of the best. And you can also count on Shopgirl to scout out some great new stuff for her column in every issue of Country Home. If you're looking for something in particular, you can e-mail her at her new address and she'll be sure to give you the low-down on what you need. (Send comments to shopgirl@mdp.com.)

This year's show was even more special for us because Country Home's parent company—Meredith Corporation—pulled out all the stops to install a very large display at the show of custom kitchens and baths designed by some of our company's best magazines.

Here was the official hype from www.nkba.com: "Partnering with NKBA, Meredith Corporation plans a truly unique collaboration between five of its consumer publications: Country Home, Better Homes and Gardens, Kitchen and Bath Ideas, Traditional Home, and Midwest Living magazines. Each of these titles will occupy a portion of the 10,000-square-foot NKBA booth space and showcase each magazine's spin on one overriding theme: "The Best of Times Are at Meredith." Visitors to the booth will wind their way through a typical day in the life of family pursuits and discover concepts and design ideas based on the individual magazines' core readership. For instance, Country Home steeps its space in personal pursuits."

Inside each magazine's area, there were lots of great ideas and high-style, innovative solutions to chronic kitchen problems such as storage, workspace, color schemes, efficiency, and so on. In our area, we installed a one-of-a-kind kitchen-in-the-round, a circular-shaped space washed in sunny color that's specially designed to not only function as a great kitchen, but provide plenty of room for a "personal pursuit"—in our case, knitting. That said, we know 99.9 out of 100 readers didn't attend this show, but the good news is that we will have photographed this set-up and will be featuring it in our October issue with inside info from all the editors, designers, and artists who poured so much overtime, angst, and thought into this production.

If you're eager for highlights, go to http://bhg.com/bhg/videos/index.jhtml for video tours of each space. Tip: Our computer gurus tell us that this link works best with a Netscape browser if you're using a Mac.

So . . . check it out and let us know what you think. We'll be posting a debrief next week when we've all had a chance to catch our breaths!